Ever-productive Robin Cook is out with his 29th novel in some 30 years. Is it his usual one, exploring a hot medical topic? Not quite. In “Intervention ($25.95),” the author attempts to combine two genres — medical and religious thrillers. Unfortunately, the result is less than stellar.
Cook spends the first half of the book telling two, seemingly unrelated, stories. One involves archaeologist-biblical scholar Shawn Doughtry, and his molecular biologist-wife, Sana. While they are in Cairo, Shawn, who heads the Department of Near Eastern Art at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, acquires an ancient book.
Sandwiched in its leather cover is a letter that says an ossuary containing the Virgin Mary’s bones is buried under St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. A thrilled Doughtry explains to Sana why the find is one of the biggest ever in archaeology, history and religion.
The other story stars the author’s favorite protagonist, Jack Stapleton, a New York medical examiner. He autopsies the body of a young, healthy woman and discovers that she died because her chiropractor tore the delicate lining of her vertebral arteries by unnecessarily manipulating her cervical spine. This sends Stapleton on a crusade against alternative medicine, but his zeal fizzles almost immediately.
“People have faith in alternative medicine because they want to believe,” he laments. “They can dismiss as irrelevant any proof that it doesn’t work, or might be dangerous.”
The two sagas finally merge when Shawn and Sana return to New York and retrieve the ossuary, which they mailed out of Vatican City disguised as the personal property of New York’s archbishop, Cardinal James O’Rourke.
The plot strains credibility as O’Rourke, Stapleton and Doughtry are all former college classmates.
The story gets a little livelier as the cardinal desperately tries to stop Doughtry from publicizing his find, which would discredit the Catholic Church’s contention that the Virgin Mary was assumed into heaven like her son, Jesus Christ.
The author, though, does an excellent job in describing the psychodynamics of Stapleton, whose infant son suffers from neuroblastoma, a childhood cancer. This saves the novel from being a total loss.
Cook, who was trained as an ophthalmologist, has obviously done a lot of research and acquired extensive knowledge of religion and archaeology. It is too bad that his effort has not produced a nail-biter.
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