by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: September 29, 2008   Last Updated: December 22, 2011

"Contagion," by medico-thriller master Dr. Robin Cook, is about nosocomial infection. That n-word describes diseases that victims contract while in hospitals. Cook's hero is Dr. Jack Stapleton, associate medical examiner of New York City. He becomes suspicious about a series of deaths resulting from rare forms of influenza and sets out to investigate.

At first Stapleton's motives are more vengeful than humanitarian. He had begun medical practice as an ophthalmologist but was forced to close his office because he couldn't compete with the HMOs. Most of the suspicious fatalities happened to patients and staff members of Manhattan General. "It had been an old, respected, university-affiliated, proprietary hospital. . . . AmeriCare had gobbled it up during the fiscally difficult times the government had unwittingly created in health care in the early 1900s." Stapleton relished being able to rub AmeriCare's nose in the muck of whatever was causing this epidemic.

Within a few chapters it becomes clear that the problem is not related to hospital hygiene or procedure but is a malignantly purposeful conspiracy of one or more individuals. The novel traces Stapleton's investigations that result in homicidal attacks on hospital staff who assist him and more than one attempt to murder Stapleton. The action is fast-moving and suspenseful. Pages turn rapidly.

Jack Stapleton, a recurring main character in Cook's novels, is complex and interesting. He lost his wife and family about the same time he lost his ophthalmology practice. He chooses to live in Harlem and to bike to work and elsewhere through Central Park. His apartment building is plagued by domestic strife, vagrants sleeping on the stairs, constant break-ins and crowbar damage, but it is close to playgrounds where he can get into pick-up basketball games. Being a honky, he would normally be excluded from the games, but he has a deadly outside shot and he paid for lighting fixtures, new backboards and new basketballs. Self-blame for his wife's and daughters' deaths has made him cynical, but his cynicism emerges in witty repartee and refusal to bow to authority.

Other aspects of Cook's novels will appeal to some and turn off others. Readers must be ready for obscure medical vocabulary like tularemia, klebsiella, coryza, and virions. Those wanting sexual scenes will be disappointed. The only bare flesh is purpural, gangrenous, or cyanotic and mostly on morgue slabs. Heavy breathing is reserved for those with pneumoconiosis or tired basketball players. Hot passion is a woman kissing her fingertips and pressing them to her lover's lips.

Like most of Cook's novels, "Contagion" mixes entertainment with serious exposure of problems in modern health care: competing HMOs, media advertising of health care, the emergence of concierge or boutique medicine, and the replacement of independent pharmacies by chain-stores operations. No one need feel ashamed reading Robin Cook.  However, the new medical terms learned are hard to insinuate into ordinary conversation.

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