Synopsis: Two Harvard PhD candidates decide to sell some of their eggs so they can get away from their tiresome lives and finish their theses. After returning from an extended trip, they decide to find out what happened to their eggs. They find themselves neck deep in a scheme involving cloning.
I have to say it's nice to read a thriller where the author obviously knows science. The story was interesting but never really turned into suspense for me. If I hadn't come up with the template I started using a few reviews ago, my log line for this book would have been: "Two ditzy Harvard PhDs confront ruthless geneticists."
And there we get the problem: The protagonists are so awkward in their investigation that the villains have to be stupid not to know what's going on. And so the tension doesn't really develop. So it's a thriller by genre, but it doesn't give me the edge-of-the-seat feel of a thriller. And the ending wasn't quite deus ex machina, but it was close. Though it lacks a true climax and all but sparce denouement.
Style-wise it's obvious that Cook's training is in medicine, not writing. His primary issues are said bookisms ("It's true," she avered. "No, it's not," he asserted. "Stop fighting with me!" she ejaculated. etc...) and a wandering point of view that can't decide to whom it belongs.
Oh yeah, that reminds me. "A very lot." Really? "A VERY lot." I can see that sounding good to Cook (I find things like that in my own work, sometimes), but you'd think someone would have said something before it was published. Maybe they did.
Despite its faults, it was a decent read.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment