In a Boston hospital two women, seemingly unconnected, are discovered to have died from the same condition, one no one has seen before. Pathologist Kate Bennett is already intrigued by the case but when her friend is admitted to the hospital with some of the same symptoms that the two women presented with prior to their deaths she becomes determined to uncover the problem. Of course there are shady forces, some close to home, who are just as determined that she will not find out the truth and thus begins the ride.

The overall story arc of Side Effects is not much of a shock: big, unethical pharmaceutical company versus a caring doctor who puts patient safety above all other considerations. But within that familiar framework there were more than enough threads to unravel and characters whose level of evilness was unclear to keep me happy, though I’ll admit to being a bit of a sucker for a medical thriller. Written in 1984 this one is pleasantly unencumbered by the today’s obsession with bio terrorism and harks back to a gentler time when good old fashioned greed was the motivator of choice for most criminals/businessmen. Throw in a possible connection to Nazi experimenters and you have yourself a roller coaster of a story and although the ending was dramatic it didn’t go over the top as so many in this genre tend to do which is another point in its favour.

Kate Bennett is a good choice for a central character, nice enough that you want her to prevail but with human enough foibles to worry that she might not. She struggles with a husband who can’t quite bring himself to think of her career is as important as his own and the portrayal of her conflict with career over personal life offers an interesting slant. Her husband Gerard is fairly annoying, at least from a woman’s perspective, though credible and there’s a bit more depth to him than you might expect to find in a thriller of this type.

This is an above average entrant in this genre, playing nicely to the fears many people have when faced with incomprehensible medical emergencies and also reaching out to the conspiracy theorist within us all. It’s fast, entertaining and recommended.

What about the audio book?

I’ve no idea what the percentages actually are but it feels like far more audio books are narrated by men than women so it’s nice to hear a female voice telling a story for a change and Angela Dawe does an excellent job with both male and female characters.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5
Narrator Angela Dawe
Publisher Brilliance Audio [this edition 2009, originally 1984]
ISBN N/A (audio download)
Length 9 hours 46 minutes (Unabridged)
Format download from audible.com
Source My collection

Title: The Fifth Vial

Author: Michael Palmer

Publisher: St Martin’s Paperbacks (2007)

ISBN: 978-0-312-93774-4

The Fifth Vial is a medical thriller in the ‘surely that couldn’t happen outside fiction…could it?’ vein. In what appear to be unrelated incidents a coroner in Florida finds recent surgery scars on the body of an unidentified man hit by a truck on the highway and a Boston detective is hired to investigate the situation. Medical student Natalie Reyes is suspended from duty and heads to Brazil to deliver a research paper and in Cameroon a brilliant doctor’s experimental drug is in danger of never reaching production due to his own health problems.

The characters here are all a little over the top but they’re fairly credible in the context of the story. The never-ending tragedies that befall Natalie do verge on far-fetched and I did start to wonder just how many more perilous situations one 35 year old woman could survive but you expect that kind of thing with these books and I was happy to go along for the ride. There’s more than one protagonist in this book and I enjoyed their different points of view and the way their parallel stories wound themselves together. I wasn’t overly fond of Natalie so it was nice to spend a chunk of time with different characters, especially fledgling detective Ben Callahan whom I did develop a soft spot for.

The plot is what you’d expect from this kind of thriller: lots of action and twists and revealing of things (and people) that are not as they first appear. It’s a pretty well-constructed example of the genre although the resolution is a little obvious and a couple of the plot devices seemed forced to me. Why would bad guys hire a complete stranger to be a flight attendant for a plane carrying only 6 passengers? Could they not get their own packets of peanuts rather than risk showing their entire evil empire to Joe Schmo? However, the book did keep me up past my bedtime which is a sure sign of a good story-telling.

I had just about given up on medical thrillers after reading the last couple of Robin Cook novels in which his insufferable moralising about the evils of modern health care administration overtook any pretence of story-telling. Happily though The Fifth Vial is a solid example of what the genre should be: an entertaining page turner that makes you wonder which parts might just be happening somewhere in the world right now.

My rating 3.5/5 (and would have been a 4 if it had 50 less pages)