As I believe I’ve mentioned before, my best friend in the whole wide world and I bonded initially over books in 6th grade. One of the things that she introduced me to was the concept of a medical thriller. She was a huge fan of Robin Cook, and Michael Palmer, and Michael Cordy. In the years since I initially devoured those books en masse, I have revisited them occasionally — and found myself to be disappointed pretty much every time. Not only at the writing […]

Typical of most Michael Palmer books, The First Patient contains twists and turns, some cutting-edge technology (well, cutting edge in 2008…), and less than a week after finishing it, I’m struggling to remember the salient plot points… Gabe Singleton and Andrew Stoddard went to the Naval Academy together, until a fatal accident derailed Singleton’s career and life. Now he works as a doctor in a small town in Wyoming, while Stoddard has gone on to become president of the United States. Then Stoddard’s personal physician goes […]

Oh, Michael Palmer. My best friend introduced me to this author in sixth grade, and we loved him. I devoured her whole collection of his books, medical thrillers that usually featured at least one dirty scene. I still have a copy of my favorite, Flashback, in which I earmarked the dirty scene so Cat could read it in the lunch-line. Beyond that one page of kissing and occasional nipples, we loved these books for the medicine and plotting. Palmer wrote The Second Opinion in 2009, and while I haven’t read […]