What an incredible waste of time! I am normally a Robin Cook fan but this book was a complete waste of my time. I don't know what I am more irritated by, that the book was so terrible or that I continued to read hoping to find a point that it became better.
The plot of the story was promising. Two Harvard coeds answer an ad in the college newspaper for egg donors at a local infertility clinic. The pay is outstanding, $45,000 per donation. They decide to spend part of it on a trip to Italy to complete their doctorate thesis and use the rest of the money as a down payment for the purchase of an apartment in Boston. (That should have been a clue that the book was going downhill- $90,000 before taxes and they were going to be able to support themselves for over a year and to put a down payment on a pricey apartment in Boston, they must have some great accounting skills). They return from their trip after 1 1/2 years and decide to find out what happened to their donated eggs. Even though they had been at the clinic less than 2 years earlier they both decide to go undercover and break into the computer system to get the information on their eggs. With amazing ease they are able to find the names of 2 recently deceased woman close to their age and they waltz into the hall of records and get copies of the death certificates for a whopping $6.00 each, using the death certificates for the social security numbers of the dead women, they go to a local bank, with NO identification (granted this was written before 9-11 but banks still requested ID for an account) to open a savings account with a total of $20 each. The bank clerk asked for ID and then tells them when they don't have it, not to worry about it, just bring it in tomorrow. They then apply for jobs at the infertility clinic, under the new aliases with disguised appearances and of course they tell the personnel dept that they are Harvard grads but once again never have to show ID or proof of their degrees.
They soon discover that the clinic is doing all sorts of cloning experiments on both humans and animals and that they are using a group of South American women as human incubators for fetuses to be aborted at 20 weeks and used for the ovaries of the female fetuses. The story gets so far fetched that it is hard to even paraphrase it. The women are discovered and a chase through the building and the grounds that houses the clinic ensues. The building was also a TB sanitarium and an insane asylum at different times in it's history so the chase is throughout the building that includes autopsy suites and iron lungs along with a spooky sub basement. It felt as though the author got tired of the story at the end because the ending was even worse than the rest of the book. It was rushed and left the reader with no resolved endings.
My advise is to skip this book, your time is more valuable than this book. :)
On a scale of 5 stars, I would only give this 1/2 star.
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