Robin Cook returns to the medical thriller format in his fourth outing, "Brain".

When Dr. Martin Phillips notices some strange goings-on around the New York hospital he works in, he begins to look into it. When researching a young lady who died unexpectedly during surgery, he discovers that her brain has been removed. And that's only scratching the surface...

While I enoyed this book for periods of thrilling action sequences, strange discoveries, and the conspiracy element that emerges in the plot, I've gotta say that at times, it just felt like a rewrite of Robin Cook's first medical thriller, "Coma". Both sort of dragged a little at the beginning, but made up for it a bit with a big payback at the end. "Brain" got started so slow that it took some eighty pages for Cook to establish (at least to get across to me, anyway) who the protagonist was.

Being that I've decided to read through Cook's novels in chronological order (in conjunction with some other things), I'm glad he's made a return to the medical thriller here. Still though, he's yet to absolutely astound me...