Product Description

It’s spring in Buffalo, New York. At sprawling St. Paul’s Hospital, new interns rush through the halls, staff doctors scramble to catch their protégés’ mistakes, and everyone is aware of one unrelenting threat: A new and vicious strain of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) has hit America hard and is menacing the hospital like a wolf at the door. Wrapped in spacesuit-like garb to search for every possible source of infection, the hospital staff desperately tries to protect the lives of patients–and of each other. Yet despite St. Paul’s best efforts, people are dying.

In this chilling medical landscape, no one notices the slight spike in the death rate in a palliative care ward. The prevailing attitude is “They’re supposed to die. That’s why we call them terminal.” When these same patients complain of terrifying near-death experiences, the hospital staff attributes it to delirium caused by medication. But when ER chief Dr. Earl Garnet gets blamed for the unexpected death of a patient, he defies protocol and opens an independent investigation. He quickly becomes suspicious that something far more sinister than disease is killing the hospital’s most vulnerable patients.

For Garnet, looking into the deaths means rattling relationships that have been built over years–relationships with several men and women he once trusted but now must doubt. With the SARS epidemic spinning out of control and a storm of suspicion, fear, and mistrust raging through the corridors of St. Paul’s, the hospital is rocked by a horrifying crime: A respected researcher is found brutally murdered. And his executioner may be ready to strike again.

With brilliant pacing, scalpel-sharp suspense, and an unmatched knowledge of the workings of a big-city hospital, Peter Clement is a thriller writer in a league of his own. In his new work, he takes us on a galvanizing, frightening, and constantly fascinating journey set on the front lines of medicine–where some dangers can be prevented and others can only be feared.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #55781 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12-27
• Released on: 2005-12-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780345457813
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Several patients die each day at St. Paul's Hospital, a sprawling complex in Buffalo, N.Y., that takes on the most high-risk cases, including victims of the SARS virus. A few more deaths a week would hardly even be noticed. But hospital vice-president Dr. Earl Garnet, star of Clement's enjoyable line of medical thrillers, perks up when he hears about a strange circumstance in the hospital's cancer wing: a few days before they died, many of the patients reported out-of-body near-death experiences. Someone, Garnet determines, has been taking cancer patients to the brink of death and tape-recording their observations before briefly bringing them back to life. Suspects include the hospital's chaplain, Jimmy Fitzpatrick, who has been lobbying for years to get St. Paul's to relax its policy on withholding pain medication to terminal patients; Monica Yablonsky, the head nurse on the cancer ward whose prickly, unhelpful demeanor makes Garnet wary; and Dr. Steward Deloram, St. Paul's critical care expert who has also done extensive research into near-death experiences. The action in Clement's sixth hospital-based thriller (Mortal Remains, etc.) moves briskly and without an overload of medical jargon. Despite several indistinguishable characters and a few dead-end plot lines—Clement does little with the SARS element after an initial buildup—this entry keeps the author on an ascending trajectory in the genre.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
Praise for Peter Clement

Mortal Remains
“Furiously paced and intricately plotted. I really cared about these characters and what happens to them. There is no higher praise I can give to anyone’s writing.”
–MICHAEL PALMER

Critical Condition
“Clement’s twenty years as an emergency physician and family doctor result in novels of stunning suspense grounded by an insider’s view of medical science.”
–The Toronto Star

Mutant
“Steeped in the thriller traditions of John Saul, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King: pulse-quickening action, a subplot of good versus evil, smatterings of blood here and there, and a hero’s race against certain disaster.”
–Doctor’s Review


The Procedure
“More than a piece of compelling fiction, The Procedure is a cautionary tale . . . An exciting and original story, well told.”
–NELSON DEMILLE

Lethal Practice
“ER meets Agatha Christie as Buffalo doctor Earl Garnet is suspected of murder via a cardiac needle. Heart-pounding suspense, indeed!”
–Entertainment Weekly


From the Hardcover edition.

Review
Praise for Peter Clement

Mortal Remains
“Furiously paced and intricately plotted. I really cared about these characters and what happens to them. There is no higher praise I can give to anyone’s writing.”
–MICHAEL PALMER

Critical Condition
“Clement’s twenty years as an emergency physician and family doctor result in novels of stunning suspense grounded by an insider’s view of medical science.”
–The Toronto Star

Mutant
“Steeped in the thriller traditions of John Saul, Dean Koontz, and Stephen King: pulse-quickening action, a subplot of good versus evil, smatterings of blood here and there, and a hero’s race against certain disaster.”
–Doctor’s Review


The Procedure
“More than a piece of compelling fiction, The Procedure is a cautionary tale . . . An exciting and original story, well told.”
–NELSON DEMILLE

Lethal Practice
“ER meets Agatha Christie as Buffalo doctor Earl Garnet is suspected of murder via a cardiac needle. Heart-pounding suspense, indeed!”
–Entertainment Weekly


From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews

Very thrilling and a page turner but...
As a registered nurse and thriller enthusiast, I was eager to read Peter Clement's 'The Inquisitor'. It is the first book by Clement that I have read.
As far as keeping your attention, I totally think the author nailed it. There are numerous twists and turns in the plot to make you read one more page before going to bed, and then another page...
The medical information is fairly accurate although there were a few times reading it I thought to myself, "Has he worked in a hospital lately?" Some of the terms he uses seem antiquated but once I got over that, I enjoyed the book immensely.
A last note is that the author generally depicts nurses as a group of not-too-high-of-calibre people who surely are lower than doctors. However, he does balance this out somewhat with a few nurse characters who are liked and well-respected in the book.
This all said, I definitely recommend this book!

"Inquisitor" will keep you on the edge of your seat turning pages...
St Paul's Hospital in Buffalo, NY is under seige by the SARS virus. Staff and patients alike have to be gowned and protected from an invisible menace.

Death tolls are rising. It's expected people will die at St. Paul's no matter how hard the docs fight against it. But, Dr. Earl Garnet, the new VP/Medical and Chief of the ER is seeing patterns he doesn't like. Terminal patients in the Palliative Care Unit are passing sooner than they are supposed to--and some who are not dying are reporting Near Death Experiences. Digging just a little further, he discovers many of those patients report a person hovering over their beds asking them questions as they are dying.

So, what's happening? Do they have an Angel of Mercy euthanizing their patients or is their resident NDE researcher engaging in some extracurricular activity?

What I really like about this story is while Clement lays out the clues, there are so many hospital workers tied in the situation and guilty for reasons both good and bad. This book not only provides a good read, but gives the reader some pause to consider paincare and the end of life. Very well done and worth looking into more of Clement's stories to find out what else Dr. Earl Garnet has experienced.

book is not well written
Peter Clement might be considered a wonderful novelist when it comes to medical thrillers, but I found his work to be full of cliches. He also switches point of view between first and third person which I found to be very jarring, completely taking me out of the story.

He tries the red herring approach, but that doesn't work either because the threads he weaves aren't all that believable to me. It's true he has the medical background, but he characterization felt stiff. His characters were flat, plus he told more than showed the action...or he did both.

I don't want to be told he's angry, I want to be shown. Also, his attempts at showing romance, I felt, were clumsy. I've read several books by Michael Palmer, Robin Cook, and a few other authors, and when I placed one of Palmers and Clements side by side, I couldn't help but notice that I felt as if I was peering over Palmer's characters' shoulders whereas with Clement felt the need to explain absolutely everything. Very annoying. One last thing, he needs to keep his exclamation points in check.