Like a Frontal Lobotomy

I won’t bother going into the roundabout way in which I found this book, but if you’re interested in the way my curiosities take me through the internet go here and here. I actually can’t recommend that second piece highly enough. It’s a fascinating look at a complicated man (choice quote, “from this point of view, Dr. Eben Alexander looks less like a messenger from heaven and more like a true son of America, a country where men have always found ways to escape the rubble of their old lives through audacious acts of reinvention.”) That actually segues nicely into my review of The Patient by Michael Palmer. Dr. Eben Alexander (author of Proof of Heaven) worked closely with Palmer as a consultant for The Patient.

Well, where to begin? The hackneyed plot of The Patient is thus (feel free to fill in the blanks as we go along, I’ve provided you with some other options in case you want to mix things up): Chiseled Jaw, the grizzled, white, male CIA (FBI, Interpol, NSA) agent has gone rogue in order to take down one last case in order to avenge his brother (wife, daughter, friend). He’s helped by Sexy Glasses, the brilliant, beautiful doctor (psychologist, museum curator, linguist) who finds herself tangled up between Chiseled Jaw and French mercenary Claude Malloche (I remember his name due to him being utterly ridiculous) who I imagined looked, give or take, like Bomb Voyage from The Incredibles as he acted more or less like a cartoon villain. The biggest surprise here was that Sexy Glasses didn’t also find herself tangled up in the sheets with Chiseled Jaw. Anyway, Sexy Glasses has to remove a tumor from Malloche’s brain before he releases a deadly toxin in the city of Boston.

I rarely touch novels like these; (and others like Patterson, Baldacci, Connelly, etc) these paint by number thrillers that barely resemble books, starring a list of rotating stock stereotypes (It would be insulting to actual characters to refer to them as anything else) aren’t really worth my time. I assume the medical science within is sound, so it at least has that going for it. So, if you like these types of books, have at it. I have my own literary vices.

My recommendations – read literally anything else.

~Meredith T.