Foreign Body

I had no idea Robin Cook was such an awful writer! Were his earlier books better, perhaps? Stilted dialogue, painfully awkward settings and scenarios, implausible plot lines...I really haven't read much that was worse than this.

I'm interested enough to finish this book. However, I don't know how this edition ever passed the editor. It is mind numbingly repetitive. Whenever a character finds out what you the reader already know, Cook re-explains it. This happens dozens of times throughout the book. Also, spanning the course of a few days make it drag on and on.

Cook's works are very decent thrillers, with the added bonus of his medical knowledge. The writing and plotting is quite decent even without the technical accuracy. His characters tend to be fairly stock, but are also reasonably detailed and complex (although often rather contradictory). This book addresses two very interesting medical themes. The first is that of medical tourism. Some of the risk factors; the siphoning off of health money to "hospitals" that only deal with "high margin" procedures, and have no resources to deal with bad outcomes; are described peripherally to the plot. The book also looks at the money involved in (US) health insurance and health management companies, and the lengths people are willing to go to in order to protect that wealth.