Mortal Fear
Robin Cook

When an eminent biomolecular geneticist dies violently before his eyes, a doctor must use more than his medical knowledge to explain what he comes to believe is murder, and to stop a scientific breakthrough from becoming a curse instead of a miracle.
There was a lot that internist Jason Howard didn't know about Dr. Alvin Hayes. But when the scientist met his sudden end, it all came out with a vengeance - for the academically respected geneticist had led a double life, and the private side was damning.
Dismissing official police reports linking Hayes's death to his associations with the sordid side of society, Jason believes Hayes was silenced to keep him from revealing the results of his research, and the secret lies not in the back streets of Boston's underworld, the Combat Zone, but in the high tech genetics laboratories of the Good Health Plan clinic.
Overcoming his own personal emotional problems, Jason turns his powers of diagnosis to deduction, vowing to solve the mystery no matter who tries to stop him,. His search will take him from gleaming modern labs to the wilds of the Pacific Northwest and back before the pieces of the deadly puzzle fall into place.
By then, Jason has unearthed the scientific breakthrough Hayes was killed to hide - and has himself become the target of a malevolent cabal, bent on using the origins of life to create hell on earth.
With this disturbing story, DNA research is shown to have a fearful potential, not only through possible mistakes and accidents, but ironically even through success.

From the very beginning, this book will catch your attention and get you hooked. People who have been given clean bills of health with their physicals are dying suddenly, as if age is catching up with them all at once. The main character of this book, Jason, is a doctor who is seeing patients of his die too early along with the patients of the other doctors in his hospital practice.

When, at a dinner meeting, a genetic researcher dies the same way after saying that people are out to kill him, Jason realizes there is more than a coincidence going on here.

This book delves into genetic research and the promises and horrors it could provide. The promises being the ability to turn off aging. The horrors being the ability to turn on the "death gene" and age and kill someone in a matter of weeks.

For a medical thriller, there is plenty of action and suspense throughout the novel. The motives of the health care world to weed out patients who indulge in unhealthy lifestyles and therefore would cost them more down the road is a realistic one turned horrific when that weeding out comes down to having them die prematurely.

There is enough realism in this book to make the fantastical believable and to send a shudder up the spine of the reader. I would recommend this book to an adult audience - less because one of the main characters is a stripper (the former live in girlfriend of the dead geneticist who now is aiding Jason in his search for the truth) and more because of the fact that this could leave anyone with a bit of a fear of the motivations of health care providers.

My rating: Four out of five snails.