Brain

After stumbling badly with Sphinx, Dr. Cook has returned to home ground, coming as close as possible to rewriting Coma scene for scene; and, though his prose is worse than ever and the finale here may elicit more giggles than chills, he again has tapped into enough hospital-based horror and dread to recapture the medical-paranoia audience. The mystery this time: why do various young female patients at the University Med Center show abnormal Pap smears at the GYN department, then develop weird neurological symptoms, and then die or disappear? The sleuth: handsome neuroradiologist Martin Phillips, mastermind (along with a Ph.D. colleague) of a new computer-programmed skull-X-ray reader, who gets suspicious when one such young woman dies during brain surgery (an operation described in more detail than most readers will want) and later turns up in the morgue with her brain completely missing! Soon Phillips is prowling through the hospital's brain-specimen collection, outraging the hospital bigwigs, and befriending a new patient who seems to be following the same exact pattern. And then events begin to snowball--this latest victim disappears, Phillips realizes that the brains in question are radioactive--as Phillips finds himself being followed by the FBI, shot at, and threatened. What's going on? Well, the explanation that seems obvious from the start--that young women are being used as unsuspecting guinea pigs in brain research--isn't exactly the whole story; and Cook deserves some credit for planting such a convincing red herring. The real solution, however, though nicely surprising on some counts, is a farfetched horror-movie contraption: a government-supported experiment guaranteed to ""change the entire complexion of society"" and guaranteed--like the widely ridiculed exposÉ scenes in the film version of Coma--to push suspense over the edge into nonsense. Also sure to undermine reader involvement: big chunks of impenetrable technologese; limp romantic moments with Phillips' lover, resident Denise; and narration that's sometimes baldly amateurish. Still, there are a few clever or offbeat touches: Phillips gets past hospital surveillance by faking a heart attack and entering, via ambulance, as an emergency patient; he uses a knife from a peanut-butter jar to cut a brain section. And, without question, Cook is able to capture--and exploit--the feelings of powerlessness and panic that many readers have about hospitals; there are certainly enough grisly, creepy details here (quite apart from the unpersuasive finale) so that those so inclined can scare themselves silly. As such, then, a qualified success--and, though not for the squeamish, a commercial certainty. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.