SHOCK

By: J.A. Hitchcock
Date: Monday, March 25, 2002

This should have been titled SCHLOCK. What has happened to Robin Cook? I have always enjoyed his novels in the past and was really looking forward to this one, especially since I had a long trip to the midwest (flying time with connecting flights was over six hours, about how long this book would last). It started out promising, then went downhill from there.

Deborah Cochrane and Joanna Meissner are roommates and students at Harvard
University. They want to take some time off to write their theses, but don't have the money. One of them sees an ad in the school paper about a place called the Wingate Clinic that is looking for egg donors. Curious, they call and find that payment is well beyond their expectations - enough to buy a condominium to rent out while they live in Venice for a year to finish up their papers. They go to the Wingate and donate their eggs (although when Joanna declines general anesthesia for local so that she's awake, the doctor and nurses kinda act freaky about it. If I were her, I would have known right then that something was wrong). They take the money and run to Venice, where they finish their papers, have a great time and come back to Boston to their lovely condo.

Deborah decides she wants to find out if any of her donated eggs are now babies. Joanna thinks this is a bad idea (you should have listened to her, Deb). But soon Joanna is as curious as Deborah when they get evasive answers. They enlist the help of a fellow student who is a computer whiz. He breaks into the Wingate's Intranet, but then freaks when it blocks him right out. Deborah insists on finding out what is what and he tells her she has to get into the computer network room at the Wingate to do anything. She has him tell her how to do it.

So, how does she get into the Wingate? She and Deborah obtain false identities by going through the obituaries and finding women close to their age who have recently died. They get their birth certificates, then get licenses in the dead women's names and apply for jobs at the Wingate. This is when the book goes totally downhill. They're hired. No security check, no pre-employment check, yet the Wingate has this whiz-bang security on their computer system and network. It made absolutely no sense. And to top it off, the girls are driving their car, which is still registered in their real names. Hello?

I had to listen to the rest of this book on audio because I was a captive audience, but I was practically guffawing out loud throughout the rest of it with the implausibilities and the tremendous stupidity of the main characters and the people at the Wingate. I really don't think anyone in real life could be this dumb. Really. And I think the other people on the plane thought I was listening to a comedy tape.

Don't bother with SHOCK. I'll give Cook one more try with his next book, if there is one. And if that one is as bad as this, he's off my list of favorite authors.