Cell : The Master of the Medical Thriller

Robin Cook

Robin Cook (born May 4, 1940) is an American physician and novelist who writes about medicine and topics affecting public health. He is best known for combining medical writing with the thriller genre. Many of his books have been bestsellers on The New York Times Best Seller List. Several of his books have also been featured in Reader's Digest. His books have sold nearly 400 million copies worldwid. The Year of the Intern was a failure, but Cook began to study bestsellers.[3] He said, "I studied how the reader was manipulated by the writer. I came up with a list of techniques that I wrote down on index cards. And I used every one of them in Coma." He conceived the idea for Coma, about illegally creating a supply of transplant organs, in 1975.[3] In March 1977, that novel's paperback rights sold for $800,000. It was followed by the Egyptology thriller Sphinx in 1979 and another medical thriller, Brain, in 1981. Cook then decided he preferred writing over a career in medicine