Robin Cook: Contagion (USA 1996)

From the Publisher:
"WHO'D HAVE EVER THOUGHT THE PEACEFUL PRACTICE OF MEDICINE COULD BE SO EXCITING? IT'S A GOOD, FAST READ." -- Denver Post
From the undisputed master of the medical thriller comes the story of a deadly epidemic spread not merely by microbes but by sinister sabotage -- a terrifying cautionary tale for the millennium as the health care giants collide...

"THE UNDERLYING THEME -- HOW EASILY COULD SOMEONE START AN EPIDEMIC -- IS ANSWERED IN A PRETTY CHILLING WAY." -- Birmingham News

A Literary Guild® Main Selection and a Main Selection of the Doubleday Book Club

DR. ROBIN COOK, a graduate of Columbia University Medical School, finished his postgraduate medical training at Harvard. He is the author of Acceptable Risk and numerous other bestselling novels.

Robin Cook: Contagion. Berkley Books, ISBN: 0425155943 (December, 1996), 480 p., $6.99.

Robin Cook: Contagion (USA 1995)

From the Publisher:
From the undisputed master of the medical thriller comes the story of a deadly epidemic spread not merely by microbes but by sinister sabotage -- a terrifying cautionary tale for the millennium as health care giants collide.

After he loses first his midwestern ophthalmology practice to a for-profit medical giant and then his family to a commuter airline tragedy, Dr. John Stapleton's life is transformed to ashes. Feeling less the golden boy than a jaded cynic, Stapleton re-trains in forensic pathology and relocates to find an uneasy niche for himself in a city that suits his changed perspective: the cold, indifferent, concrete maze of New York.

Stapleton thinks he is past pain and past caring, but as a series of virulent and extremely lethal illnesses -- capped by a particularly deadly outbreak of a rare strain of influenza -- strikes the young, the old, and the innocent, his suspicions are aroused. When the apparent epicenters of these outbreaks are revealed to be hospitals and clinics controlled by the same for-profit giant that cannibalized his old ophthalmology practice, Stapleton fears he has stumbled upon a diabolic conspiracy of catastrophic proportions: Could the for-profit giant be engaged in the systematic elimination of its more costly subscribers?

Getting at the truth leads Stapleton to an unlikely pairing -- both professionally and personally -- with Theresa Hagan, an art director at a hot Madison Avenue advertising firm. Together they discover that the real explanation behind the killer contagions is even more Machiavellian than could be imagined.

Contagion anticipates some of the uncharted consequences of managed health care, an age when even the wariest consumer may be at risk. It is Robin Cook at his unerring best.

Dr. Robin Cook is currently on leave from the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary. He lives and works in Florida.

Robin Cook: Contagion. Putnam's, ISBN: 0399141065 (January, 1996), 346 p., $24.95.