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"exciting medical thriller"

Geneticist Dr. Kathleen Sullivan and ER Chief Dr. Richard Steele are making love when she suddenly collapses in pain from a tremendous headache caused by a massive brain hemorrhage. Kathleen loses almost all movement, as she has become a quadriplegic with several critical bodily reflexes failing. She is reduced to communicating with one wink meaning yes and two winks no.

Dr. Tony Hamlin heads up the medical team with assists from Dr. Jim Norris and Dr. Lockman. The staff tries an illegal experimental infusion through Kathleen's neck. Desperate she struggles to inform her beloved Richard that the crack medical team is using her as a guinea pig before they either kill her or leave her with a malfunctioning brain.

CRITICAL CONDITION is an exciting medical thriller that never slows down due to the intrepid frantic actions of the lead female protagonist. The story belongs to Kathleen whose efforts to convey information is difficult and frustrating to her and to the receiver of her eye lid transmissions. The support cast augments the plot with strong characterizations though the constant reference to Richard?s dismal handling of his deceased wife's cancer adds little to the current dilemma except to make the hero seem unreliable when it counts. In this potent story that is unnecessary as Richard is already laden with handicaps such as doubting his peers, dealing with the couple's teenage children from separate marriages, coping with the lack of complex communications, and handling the overall health of his beloved. Each of these is handled with depth and dexterity as they nurture the forward thrust of Peter Clement's exhilarating thriller.

Harriet Klausner

Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted March 31, 2002

In the heat of a passionate encounter, ecstasy suddenly turns to terror for renowned geneticist and TV personality Dr. Kathleen Sullivan. Stricken by a brain hemorrhage, she is rendered completely paralyzed and speechless . . . but still utterly aware; a prisoner inside her own body.

Kathleen is rushed to a Manhattan hospital, her chances of survival slim. Even if she pulls through, the likelihood that she?ll sustain permanent brain damage is near one hundred percent. But neither outcome can compare to the insidious fate in store for her masterminded by the very people entrusted with saving her life. As her lover, ER chief Richard Steele, watches and waits for a miracle, Kathleen becomes a pawn in a clandestine plot that runs deeper than medical politics?and reaches into the highest echelons of power at New York City Hospital.

Placed in the hands, and at the mercy, of revered Chief of Neurosurgery Dr. Tony Hamlin, Kathleen descends into a waking nightmare. Powerless to resist the sinister experiments she is subjected to, and unable to cry out for help, she must fight desperately to communicate her tortured, trapped thoughts to Steele?before her tormentors can carry their bizarre and potentially lethal work to its completion.

Ruthlessly determined to achieve their goals, the secret cabal of ambitious physicians will go to any length to avoid discovery, defy the law, and make medical history at all costs . . . even the human life they are sworn to preserve.

For anyone who has ever had a mortal fear of hospitals, and the sense of powerlessness that often transpires within their cold, sterile corridors, Peter Clement?s Critical Condition will provide chilling new nightmares?along with infectious suspense.