![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/Death-Benefit-2769759.jpg\" "\\"Death-Benefit-2769759\\"")
<\/a>I figure we make a deal with an author when we read popular fiction. If he or she will present an original story based on plausible circumstances and that story holds our interest for the flight to grandma\u2019s or a few days on the beach, then, OK, we\u2019ll accept the stock characters, the occasional clich\u00e9 and the inanity of the experience.<\/p>\n\u00a0The good popular fiction writers give us something more, of course. They might introduce us to the culture of the Mafia \u2013 The Godfather<\/em> \u2013 or to life running an airport \u2013 Airport<\/em>. These authors research their subjects deeply and give us a bit of education about science or history or culture.<\/p>\n \u00a0In his latest book, Robin Cook gives us all of what we expect and then an interesting side lesson on regenerative medicine, infectious diseases and hedge funds.<\/p>\n Pia Grazdani is a fourth-year student at Columbia University Medical Center, and the most beautiful woman in New York, even when she has a black eye. She\u2019s so brilliant that the Nobel Prize-winning researcher for whom she works deviates from his usual practice of ignoring everyone else in the human race to tell her so. She has a boyfriend who is a schmuck, but who is also a brilliant medical student and nice.<\/p>\n Then there are the bad guys who, by betting against their own company\u2019s investments, made a lot of money in the Wall Street crash. But now they need new jobs. So, they plan to get even richer by buying the life insurance policies of diabetics and other terminally ill people who are in financial trouble \u2013 mostly due to the recession these two helped start \u2013 and who are likely to die soon. The bad guys will then collect the \u201cdeath benefit,\u201d buy more policies and securitize the policies, much as they did with low-grade mortgages in the early 2000s.<\/p>\n So, how do these two worlds meet?<\/p>\n If the Nobel professor starts regenerating kidneys and other human organs, then the people upon whom the bad guys are depending to die will live. And there goes the business model. Of course the bad guys don\u2019t realize this until they have loaded up on policies and then learn that a wicked woman who used to work for them but quit before she, herself, also got rich anticipating the 2008 market crashes, has started shorting the stock of their new company. She\u2019s repeatedly described as a \u201cbitch.\u201d<\/p>\n Throw in the Albanian mafia, a few elitist academic types at Columbia, a grandmother in Arizona and, of course, a middle-age man who abandoned his child when she was 6, doesn\u2019t see her for 20 years and then is surprised that she doesn\u2019t run to Daddy in joy, and you fill out the book.<\/p>\n Cook knows how to write these stories, having written 30 others. This one is a lot of fun, so much so that at the end, I parked in my motel\u2019s lot to listen to the last two CD tracks, narrated deftly by George Guidall, to learn the conclusion. I couldn\u2019t wait until my next day\u2019s drive.<\/p>\n And that\u2019s where I was so disappointed. After having woven this terrific thriller that tied the medical, investment and mafia worlds together, Cook gives us the most simplistic ending, one that took no imagination whatsoever.<\/p>\n And, on top of that, we never learn what happened to grandma, the schmuck boyfriend or the arrogant Columbia administrators.<\/p>\n