Manner of Death

July 1, 2023

As New York City's chief medical examiner, Laurie Montgomery thinks that pathology resident Ryan Sullivan needs to polish his skills and has him join her on a suicide autopsy. A few days later, Ryan arrives on the autopsy table, apparently a suicide himself, and Laurie is guilt-ridden until her medical examiner husband determines that this death could be murder. More medical terror from a pro. Prepub Alert.

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October 1, 2023
Series regulars Laurie Montgomery and Jack Stapleton (Genesis, 2019; Night Shift, 2022) return in this for-the-fans-only medical thriller. Laurie, New York City's chief medical examiner, is troubled by an apparent death by suicide. She has reason to suspect that the deceased may have been murdered and wonders if there could be a connection to other, similar cases. She insists a pathology resident, Ryan Sullivan, do the autopsy, and then he dies, purportedly by suicide. When Jack, Laurie's husband, begins digging into the death, he discovers an alarming trend that, as Cook's regular readers will expect, points to a conspiracy, this time from within the medical establishment. Like Cook's other novels, this one has plucky heroes, dastardly villains, a brisk pace, and an ending full of comeuppances. Series fans will have a good time.

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October 9, 2023
Cook’s subpar 14th outing for married medical examiners Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery (after 2022’s Night Shift) makes the baffling choice to reveal that former Navy SEAL Hank Roberts has killed financial adviser Sean O’Brien on behalf of a company called Oncology Diagnostics in its opening pages, effectively draining the ensuing plot of suspense. From there, O’Brien’s body makes its way to the autopsy table of Montgomery, New York City’s chief medical examiner, with law enforcement suggesting his death was a suicide. With the help of pathology resident Ryan Sullivan, however, Montgomery realizes that O’Brien has, in fact, been murdered. Sullivan soon learns of six other recent cases in Montgomery’s office in which a presumed suicide showed signs of foul play and begins to investigate the links between them before turning up dead of an apparent suicide himself. Montgomery is sure that Sullivan, too, has been killed, and she launches her own probe; Stapleton gets involved after a high-profile news reporter and her husband turn up dead in an apparent murder-suicide and links start to appear between that case and his wife’s. Cook alternates the investigations with scenes that shine a light on the crooked inner workings of Oncology Diagnostics, which pays Roberts and other ex-military killers to eliminate people who threaten its profits. Cook’s characters are paper-thin, and much of the plotting is predictable. Only the author’s most devoted fans will find this worth their time. Agent: Erica Silverman, Trident Media.

November 1, 2023
A pathology resident hunts for evidence linking a handful of suspicious suicides. Like many of Cook's novels, this one features Laurie Montgomery, chief medical examiner for the City of New York, and her medical examiner husband, Jack Stapleton, but the main protagonist this time around is Ryan Sullivan, an autopsy-averse resident doing a month-long rotation in the CME's office. He's curious about the commonalities among a handful of deaths that are believed to be suicides and sets out to prove they're somehow connected, risking his life in the process. In a parallel plot line, we meet Hank Roberts, a former Navy SEAL turned assassin who's been hired to make homicides look like suicides for a health-care company that's bilking corporations out of millions through phony diagnostic tests that indicate their employees have cancer when they don't. While the idea of health-care companies killing troublesome patients seems farfetched, Sullivan's meticulous investigation into the deaths is one of the novel's few highlights, as are scenes explaining how toxicology, scene investigation, and autopsy help MEs and their investigators determine the manner of death. Unfortunately, stilted dialogue stuffed with clich�s is a distraction from Sullivan's intriguing detective work, as are details of the bureaucratic minutiae involved in running a medical examiner's office. Since Coma was published in 1977, Cook's status as a founder of the medical thriller genre has garnered him countless bestsellers. Despite the novel's weaknesses, diehard fans may be willing to wade through them in order to spend time--albeit limited--with Montgomery and Stapleton. Too few thrills in this thriller barely keep it on life support.

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