Nano

October 29, 2012
This accomplished if familiar medical thriller from bestseller Cook picks up the story of doctor-to-be Pia Grazdani after her horrific experiences in 2011’s Death Benefit, which included being abducted and witnessing a colleague, Will McKinley, being shot in the head. Pia decides to defer her New York City residency in favor of taking a position with Nano, a Boulder, Colo., company on the cutting edge of nanotechnology research. Nano’s development of “a microbivore-based antibacterial treatment” may help Will recover. To no reader’s surprise, Nano’s stereotypical evil businessman/scientist head, Zachary Berman, is prepared to jump across experimental ethics lines in pursuit of his own ends. Though Berman’s company finds a way to enable “a man to survive a massive, normally lethal medical crisis apparently unharmed,” Pia suspects that something more sinister is in the works. The concept of a young medico stumbling on a deadly conspiracy may have been fresh in 1977’s Coma, but more than three decades later, there isn’t much novelty left.

November 15, 2012
A medical/scientific thriller from Cook (Vital Signs, 1991, etc.). Nanotechnology operates at the one-billionth of a meter level, and at such a scale, the tiniest details matter. In things medical, nanobots can swarm inside your body and fix all sorts of things--but then, as anyone who recalls the old Raquel Welch vehicle Fantastic Voyage will immediately twig, there are dangers attendant. Enter sexy Pia Grazdani, who last turned up in Cook's Death Benefit (2011) and who is now taking her medical education in new directions as a researcher at Nano LLC, a think-tank-ish lab out west. There are sequelae attendant from that last book, too, not least of them a classmate with a nasty head wound, which, given that antibiotics and "multiple surgical debridements" haven't done much good, has prompted Pia to seek teeny, tiny cures. Her new boss is both dreamy and creepy, and he's nothing but one big wolf whistle whenever he's around her. But that's not so often, since he's always jetting off somewhere or another to cut deals with sometimes shadowy figures--and by the end of the story, Cook has involved Mafiosi from Eastern Europe, Chinese Olympic officials, and various and sundry industrial espionage types. Can Pia discover what she needs to without stumbling into some trade secret and getting herself killed in the bargain? Will she wind up "in a drugged state" in some petro-tycoon's harem? Will Zachary Berman ever shake his hangover and become the good guy we know he can be? A by-the-numbers thriller with no surprises but with the usual satisfactions.

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November 15, 2012
Pia Grazdani, the heroine of Cook's previous thriller, Death Benefit (2011), has relocated from New York to Colorado, where she's taken a job at Nano, a cutting-edge nanotechnology company. Though Pia thinks she's found a safe haven there, she begins to suspect that Nano might not be as transparent as the charismatic CEO, Zachary Berman, makes it out to be. While jogging on her lunch break, Pia stumbles across a Chinese man in cardiac arrest. She revives him and rushes him to the hospital only to have Zachary and Nano security guards spirit him right out of the ER. Wondering what the company could be hiding, Pia resolves to gain access to a secure building at Nano, even if it means having to get close to Zachary, whose infatuation with her borders on obsession. As in any Cook novel, the scientific details are fascinating, but here the characters are underdeveloped, and the constant objectification of Pia by almost every man who crosses her path wears thin.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)