(pb; 1991)
From the back cover
“Dr. Josh Heller can’t explain the alarming rise in difficult labors among his patients at Tampa Memorial Hospital. Many of these women─young, low risk, in perfect health at noon─are dying in the delivery room by midnight.
“And then there are the babies, tiny infants distinguished by wisps of red hair and luminescent green eyes.
“Pat Heller, Josh’s wife and a seasoned medical reporter, begins to unravel the enigma of ‘Christmas Babies,’ and uncovers a dangerous alliance between a Florida senator and a brilliant, psychopathic doctor. They share a deadly secret: a genetic experiment utopian in premise but horrifying in practice. From the seeds of corruption, greed and madness, their fearsome creations are entering the world.”
Review
Christmas is an entertaining, solidly written if melodramatic and largely by-the-numbers medical thriller. Keane and Black deliver a burn-through read, with plot-convenient dumb characters (particularly Josh Heller, who deserves a Bad Parent of the Decade award for leaving his kid with a woman he barely knows─I haven’t seen such dumbf**k parenting since the storyline of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2015 crap-film The Visit).
Christmas sports sly humor as well, e.g., the headquarter address of the ethically questionable, computer-hacking DNA, Inc. is 405 Border Lane. Cute, yes, but still an indication of playfulness.
This thoroughly familiar but
fun medical thriller is worth the two dollars I paid for it, a two-hour
distraction while I waited for my sleeping pills to kick in─a solid work by a
solid writer (or writers, if Black provided more than medical information).
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