Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time


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Clearing the Cache

Coma by Robin Cook

Rules of Prey by John Sandford

Twilight of the Democracies by Anne Applebaum

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Coma – 2/5 Stars I wasn’t alive when this book or the first of the tv movies came out, but Robin Cook also wrote a book called Outbreak, which shares a lot of parallels with the Richard Preston book The Hot Zone and the movie. I also distinctly remember seeing ads for an early 1990s mini-series based on another of his books. If you’ve read The Firm, you might have felt a similar kind of disappointment in finding out the ultimate resolution of the mystery […]

And Old Favorite Still Resonates

Acceptable Risk by Robin Cook

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So I read this story for the first time as a teenager and actually read it during the winter months in Pennsylvania. I loved the atmosphere of this book and it started my interest in the Salem Witch Trials as well. It was great to re-read my copy again and besides a few pacing issues here and there, I thought this was a solid thriller to read for Halloween Bingo 2019. I won’t lie though that the medical mystery that Cook gets into is a […]

I want my 25 cents back

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My best friend introduced me to Robin Cook in sixth grade, and we both loved his medical thrillers. I found some of his books recently for super cheap (a quarter each!) at a rummage sale, and couldn’t resist grabbing them all. I sent her a snap of Abduction when I started it, and she warned me that it doesn’t hold up well — but I’m pretty sure I never read it the first time around (it came out in ’02, and I’d moved on from Cook […]

Robin Cook is an old white dude — how did I never realize this??

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My very best friend in the whole world & I bonded over books the first semester of sixth grade. I introduced her to Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and she introduced me to the medical thriller genre — Michael Crichton, Michael Palmer, and of course, Robin Cook (we also read a lot of Lillian Jackson Braun. we were–are–huge dorks). I can still picture the covers of Cook’s books clearly: Vector, Fever, Outbreak, Coma, and our favorite, Mutation (which Cat dropped in the pool so it swelled to three times […]



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