Marissa is tiny one hundred pounds and five feet tall (something we’re never allowed to forget). The main character is Dr Marissa Blumenthal, a young doctor who has recently qualified to join Atlanta’s renowned Centre for Disease Control, or CDC where she’ll be a field officer. It predates The Hot Zone by 8 years, being published in 1987. How confusing!īoth Outbreak and The Hot Zone have the ebola virus at their heart, but where Preston’s book is journalistic, Outbreak is a novel of pure airport cheese of the most enjoyable, yet cliched type. I’d been mixing it up with Outbreak the movie – which was based on a section of Douglas Preston’s non-fiction book The Hot Zone which I have read. I was sure I’d read Outbreak, but once I started reading it was clear that I hadn’t. That was actually quite creepy as medical thrillers go. The one he’s most famous for is probably Coma – which was made into a film starring Michael Douglas and Genevieve Bujold and was about “accidental comas” induced on the operating table leading to organ farming. The Robin Cook who wrote this and many other thrillers is American and looks like this (left).ĭecades ago, I read quite a few of Cook’s thrillers. The first thing was to dispel any lingering hopes that this book had been written by the late red-haired Labour politician. No prizes for guessing which one came out of the hat! Outbreak by Robin Cook Human Traces by Sebastian Faulks (800 pages!).Rainy brain, sunny brain by Elaine Fox (about Optimism & Pessimism).Fragile Lives – Stephen Westaby (which I reviewed here).Outbreak by Robin Cook Not a red hair in sight – he is not THAT Robin Cook.Two months ago, when we were choosing which medical book to read, the nominations were varied – from real surgeons and psychiatrists or psychologists to fictional surgeons and psychiatrists or psychologists… Our topic for discussion this month was medicine.