(unabridged audiobook read by George Guidall): Dr. Daniel Lowell has discovered a new stem cell procedure to cure many currently terminal diseases. Senator Ashley Butler publicly opposes all such research but secretly offers to become Lowell's guinea pig to cure his Parkinson's Disease before his illness is discovered by the public. The rest of the book is a tangle of intrigue involving the mafia, the Catholic Church, the Shroud of Turin, organ harvesting, and US politics. It's a great set-up, read by a truly talented voice actor, but about halfway through I realized that horrible truth: there's no way it could end satisfyingly. And it doesn't. Most of the issues raised are never resolved, and the so-called climax is very, well, anti-climatic. I could deal with it if it was just the social, ethical, and political questions that were left open-ended, but even much of the plot just sort of fizzles out. I've enjoyed the other books I've read by Robin Cook, but this one felt like it bit off more than it could chew. ( )

Review by Jeremy Taylor

Robin Cook, medical doctor turned prolific fiction writer, typically writes the kind of fiction that earns single-word reviews. Descriptions like “brilliant,” “thrilling,” and “gripping” make good soundbytes that can appear on dust jackets and in advertisements. With his latest novel, Seizure, Dr. Cook has again penned a book that can be summed up in a single word: agonizing.

From the very beginning all the way to the undramatic ending, Seizure plods along, hampered by underdeveloped characters, bizarre and disconnected side plots, and a central message that is poorly articulated and embarrassingly biased.

Senator Ashley Butler is powerful, outspoken, and one of the most conservative democrats in history. He’s tough on the issues, a grandstander on the Senate floor, and a bulldog when it comes to lobbyists. He’s also a sick man, his normal motor functions eroded a little more each day by his progressively debilitating Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. Daniel Lowell is egotistical, stubborn, greedy, and brilliant. His revolutionary technique for cloning stem cells could change the medical industry—and do away with diseases like Senator Butler’s forever. But is the world ready to say yes to cloning?

As Senator Butler faces the ethical dilemma of his life—stick with his principles and ban Dr. Lowell’s procedure, or abandon his traditional morals and become a human guinea pig in hopes of ridding himself of his disease—Dr. Lowell prepares to face the onslaught of political and ethical outrage his new technology will undoubtedly provoke. When the influential senator approaches him with a clandestine offer to guarantee passage of a bill protecting his procedure if he will heal the senator’s Parkinson’s, all signs should point to an intriguing and controversial medical thriller. Unfortunately, what results instead is without question the weakest effort Cook has ever produced.

From the earliest chapters one of the book’s primary errors is readily apparent: Cook forgot to include any likeable characters. Senator Butler comes across as a hypocritical bull, which is almost certainly what the author intended. Dr. Cook seems to be firmly entrenched on the side of his most liberal colleagues in the medical profession, who appear to believe that anyone not in favor of “therapeutic” cloning and stem-cell research are either religious wackoes or anti-scientific idiots. Senator Butler is portrayed as both. Cook stops short of making the senator’s “conversion” in the face of his illness a heroic gesture, but there is no agonizing over it either. The morally righteous senator abandons his ideals with all the forethought of a lemming sprinting over a cliff.

Daniel Lowell, who with his pro-cloning, semi-legal medicine is supposed to be the maverick hero, is abrasive and annoying. His romantic relationship with his assistant is problematic enough in a book about an ethical controversy, but sexual ethics aside, the relationship is enough to make the reader cringe. At least once in nearly every chapter the words “a wave of frustration washed over him” or “she fought back her anger” appear. The couple don’t like each other, can’t work together, and manage to irritate the reader almost as much as they bother one another. Dr. Cook should stay away from trying to write romance into his future books.

Another serious problem is the ineffective preachiness of the book’s message. Dr. Cook obviously feels that cloning is justified as long as it doesn’t result in the birth of a human baby, the theoretical procedure known as “reproductive cloning.” In the author’s note he makes a point of distinguishing reproductive cloning from theraputic cloning, where stem cells are harvested from a human blastocyst (a pre-implantation fetus), the nucleus removed, and DNA from a donor cell implanted, forming a new cell capable of either developing into a human baby or virtually any other kind of cell desired by the genetic engineers running the show. In theory, and in Seizure, this kind of procedure is capable of turning back the clock on progressive diseases like Parkinson’s. In real life, the idea is controversial and sparks heated debate at all levels of the political spectrum. Far from being a mainstream ideal, as Cook would have his readers believe, theraputic cloning is contested by many in the medical field as a risky and baseless guess without sufficient evidence of plausibility. For Christians, of course, cloning presents a spiritual problem; manipulating life at the genetic level sounds to many like playing God.

With its controversial message, Seizure should have been a provocative and interesting read. The best “message books” make readers second-guess themselves while dialoging with the characters. A prime example is the “Kerry Kilcannon” political trilogy by Richard North Patterson. Through thoughtful plot lines and brilliantly crafted characters, Patterson succeeds in drawing readers into his serious discussions about abortion, judicial legislation, and gun control. Even those who disagree with Patterson’s conclusions can appreciate the literary skill by which he takes his readers along for the ride. A good writer can get a message across in a way that allows the reader to temporarily suspend his own prejudices and beliefs. Such books, incidentally, can be dangerous for some Christians who are not fully able to return to reality once the suspension of disbelief is broken; take all the uproar over Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code as an example. With Seizure, however, this danger does not exist, because the author fails in this literary goal. There is no suspension of disbelieve because the reader never gets drawn into the story. Thus the message Cook wants to get across is convoluted and remains utterly unconvincing. Readers who don’t believe that theraputic cloning is morally acceptable will not be swayed, and those who do agree with the premise will be left wondering why they had to put up with the characters just to be convinced of something in which they already believe.

Another problem with the book is the author’s use of strange subplots that contribute little to the story other than unintended questions about the sanity and intelligence of the characters. Somehow, between an international hunt for a scrap from the Shroud of Turin and a laughably stereotypical Mafia-like crime syndicate, the central plot of the story—the botched operation by which Senator Butler develops temporal lobe epilepsy (leading to seizures, as the title suggests)—doesn’t unfold until the last few chapters.

Seizure is a disappointment on every front. Robin Cook, an internationally best-selling author, has let his ideas about the future of medicine get in the way of his ability to write a good story. He refers to his work as “faction,” fiction with a good deal of fact thrown in, but Seizure could be better characterized as “function”—bad fiction interspersed with a lot of junk. Hopefully his next novel will be good enough to make up for this one.

(http://www.cerebralexchange.com/books...) ( )