Amy Rogers's Blog: Science & Medical Thrillers and more, page 2

Book review: THE DEUS MACHINE by Pierre Ouelette

Summary:

An economic downturn has sent the United States into the throes of depression. Middle-class riots and a crack-like designer drug, Zap 37, rip into the social fabric. A paramilitary government cabal is determined to maintain America’s superpower status at any price. Their weapon: the DEUS machine, the computer brainchild of a mad genius. DEUS is empowered to create and relentlessly improve a “child” of its own, rendering it immensely powerful and incomprehensible to its creator...

Book review: FINAL THEORY by Mark Alpert

Summary:

David Swift, a failed physicist turned science historian, is summoned by the police to the deathbed of his former mentor, renowned physicist Hans Kleinman. The elderly scientist and student of Albert Einstein was beaten and tortured by an unknown assailant seeking information about the Einheitliche Feldtheorie, or unified theory, a single set of equations that would explain all the forces of Nature. Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for this theory, but he d...

Book review: LIFE SUPPORT by Tess Gerritsen

Summary:

ER doctor Toby Harper works the night shift, her days eclipsed by caring for her mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s. She’s a good doctor, thorough and devoted—but one night she loses a patient. He didn’t die; the demented and confused elderly man walked out of the ER and disappeared. Toby tries to find the man, who came from an exclusive retirement facility for the wealthy, but the staff at the retirement community offer no help. When a second man from the retirement center c...

Book review: THE THINGS THAT KEEP US HERE by Carla Buckley

Summary:

The next “great” flu pandemic finally strikes. As plague and winter descend on Columbus, Ohio, human activity grinds to a halt. One family struggles to survive, forced by circumstances to choose between what is right and what is practical.

Their marriage shaken by the death of their infant son years ago, Peter and Ann Brooks recently separated. Ann cares for their two elementary-school age daughters; Peter works as a veterinarian/scientist at the university. Peter is tracking...

Book review: STIFF by Mary Roach

Summary:

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers is a nonfiction book about the amazing adventures of dead people. No, not brain-eating zombies, but ordinary cadavers, like you and me (someday). This unusual journalistic endeavor takes a light-hearted though unavoidably gory trip through the myriad ways a corpse can make the transition from flesh into dust. Chapters cover topics such as: practicing surgery on the dead; body snatching; human decay; human crash test dummies; organ tra...

Book review: CHROMOSOME 8 by Peter Holt

Summary:

Human DNA is the product of evolution, mutated and reprogrammed across eons. But fragments of primordial instructions remain in every cell; what if they could be reactivated?

Biologist Marcus Oden and his geologist friend Nick Kondos are the Ocean Sciences Institute, a shabby pair of adventurers working out of a battered seaplane in the South Pacific. Marcus is looking for more than answers to scientific questions; he also hunts for his wife, lost at sea in the region years ag...

Book review: THE DOT AND THE LINE: A Romance in Lower Mathematics by Norton Juster

Summary:

Once upon a time there was a sensible straight line who was hopelessly in love with a beautiful dot. But the dot, though perfect in every way, only had eyes for a wild and unkempt squiggle. All of the line’s romantic dreams were in vain, until he discovered…angles! Now, with newfound self-expression, he can be anything he wants to be–a square, a triangle, a parallelogram….And that’s just the beginning!First published in 1963 and made into an Academy Award-winning animated shor...

Book review: DEJA DEAD by Kathy Reichs

Summary:

Dr. Temperance Brennan (Tempe), a forensic anthropologist in Montreal, Quebec, is looking forward to a weekend away from the autopsy suite when she’s called to the location of some freshly-discovered human remains. The dismembered and decapitated corpse, wrapped in plastic bags, definitely isn’t a simple archeology case. Tempe tries to maintain a professional objectivity about the case of this mutilated woman, but she sees certain parallels to another case of sexual violence a...

Book review: DEAD ON ARRIVAL by Matt Richtel

Summary:

An airplane touches down at a desolate airport in a remote Colorado ski town. Shortly after landing, Dr. Lyle Martin, a world-class infectious disease specialist, is brusquely awakened to shocking news: Everyone not on the plane appears to be dead. The world has gone dark. While they were in the air, a lethal new kind of virus surfaced, threatening mankind’s survival, and now Martin—one of the most sought-after virologists on the planet until his career took a precipitous slid...

Book review: THE COMING STORM by Mark Alpert

Summary:

New York City, 2023: Rising seas and superstorms have ravaged the land. Food and electricity are scarce. A dangerous Washington regime has terrorized the city, forcing the most vulnerable and defenseless people into the flood-ravaged neighborhoods. The new laws are enforced by an army of genetically enhanced soldiers, designed to be the fiercest and cruelest of killers. Genetic scientist Dr. Jenna Khan knows too much about how these super-soldiers were engineered: by altering...