Amazon.co.uk Review
Tess Gerritsen used to be a doctor, so it comes as no great surprise that the medical parts of her latest thriller are very convincing, even if most of the action happens in a place where few doctors have ever practised--outer space.
Dr. Emma Watson and five other hand-picked astronauts are about to take part in the trip of a lifetime--studying living creatures in space. But an alien life form, found in the deepest crevices of the ocean floor is accidentally brought aboard the shuttle Atlantis. This mutated alien life form makes the creatures in Aliens look like backyard pets.
Soon the crew are suffering severe stomach pains, violent convulsions and eyes so bloodshot that a gallon of Optrex wouldn't help. Gerritsen brilliantly describes the difficulties of treating sick people inside a space module, and how the lack of gravity affects the process of taking blood and inserting a nasal tube. Dr. Watson does her best, but her colleagues die off one by one and the people at NASA don't want to risk bringing the platform back to Earth. Only Emma's husband, a doctor/astronaut, refuses to give up on her. As we read along, eyes popping out of their sockets, all that's missing is one of those bland NASA voices saying, "Houston, we have a problem--we're being attacked by tiny little creatures that are part human, part frog and part mouse."
Here are some other examples of Gerritsen's controlled medical horrors:Bloodstream, Harvest, and Life Support. --Dick Adler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Praise for The Surgeon: 'If you like your crime medicine strong, this will keep you gripped' Mail on Sunday 'Authentic, convincing' Sunday Times Praise for The Apprentice: 'Goes head-to-head with Nicci French and Karin Slaughter to scare the pants off you! A classic page-turner, full of melodrama' Daily Mirror 'Compulsive' Irish Times Praise for Gerritsen: 'Tess Gerritsen is an automatic must-read in my house. If you've never read Gerritsen, figure in the price of electricity when you buy your first novel by her 'cause baby, you are going to be up all night. She is better than Palmer, better than Cook! Yes, even better than Crichton' Stephen King 'This page turner proves that Gerritsen is tops in her genre' USA Today 'Superb research lifts Gerritsen to the top of the ladder as Michael Crichton and Robin Cook wave from below' Kirkus
A strongly plotted thriller about a plague-like epidemic on a space station. Superb research lifts Gerritsen to the top of the ladder as Michael Crichton and Robin Cook wave from below. Gerritsen's tale doesn't have the mystical touch that Stanislaw Lem would have added, though the essential mystery here is a fairly mystical monster, a multicellular microscopic organism called the Chimera. A geologist, trapped in a submersible 19,000 feet deep in the Galapagos Rift, ties in with an outbreak on mankind's first internationally built space station (ISS), orbiting earth. The ISS, five years in the assembling and twice as long as a football field, is manned by an international team of scientists whose work, in part, focuses on testing the effects of weightlessness on microbes and viruses. When tested on earth, such cultures can grow only on flat slides. In space, without gravity, they grow three-dimensionally and assume unbounded shapes. Someone has hoodwinked the space doctors by having them test an absolutely unknown organism that has been lifted from bubbling thermals on the ocean floor. This creature has hideous properties that allow it to take on the DNA of any host it enters, be such lab mouse, frog, or human. Thus, any vaccine that might kill the amazing Chimera, whose DNA is part frog, part mouse, and part human, would kill the host as well. The story builds to a Liebestodt of dancing horror as fatal globules of infected blood erupt weightlessly from the dying, float about the ship, and clog the air filters. Meanwhile, the main romantic interest turns on a couple in the process of divorce, astronauts Emma Watson and Dr. Jack McCallum. Doc Gerritsen (Bloodstream, 1998, etc.), a former internist who creates chilling viral disasters, knows all the natural gates and alleys of the human bio-novel as well as she does the musculature of suspense. (Kirkus Reviews)
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by Tess Gerritsen
by Tess Gerritsen
by Tess Gerritsen
by Tess Gerritsen
by Tess Gerritsen
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