Marker – Robin Cook

I am not one of those who faint at the sight of their own blood. On the contrary, when I watch shows like ER I fleetingly regret not choosing medicine as a career. However, I must confess that a lurid description of the journey of sperm right from when enters the female body till it successfully starts conception was a bit too much for my taste. It was a great way of starting the novel but a little uncalled-for in my opinion. I almost put the book down after the first page.

Another trip to the library in the near future was rather uncertain however and so I decided to make the best of things. I am glad I did because I liked the rest of the book despite the fact that the protagonists – Laurie Montgomery and her friend-cum-boyfriend Jack Staplenton - both work as medical examiners. I rather stay away from books that use city morgues or cemeteries for their plots. :-(

So now, onto the storyline in a nutshell. Laurie is just about fed up with her colleague, friend and boyfriend Jack’s indecisiveness on the subject of marriage and children. Aware that at 43 her biological clock is ticking loud and clear, she decides to move out of Jack’s place. Like most of us, she doesn’t have a clue as to what life has in store for her right around the corner. During the course of autopsies, she comes across a rather curious occurance of apparently healthy patients dying of sudden cardiac failure after a simple operation in a prestigious city hospital. What’s more, all these patients are subscribers of the managed care Insurance giant AmeriCare.

As the corpses pile on, the possibility of the whole situation being a coincidence rapidly falls but Laurie is helpless as there are few takers for her theory of a serial killer being on the loose. This mystery on the professional front is what keeps her from falling apart because of the problems crowding her personal life - like an eminent collapse of her relationship with Jack and rather chilling implications of her mother’s breast cancer.

Laurie fights on though and discovers a truth that is enough to send a chill down the spine of any reader who realizes the possibility of this happening in the real life because of the advances in the medical science and the limitless greed of humans. A good read!