Got this free on kindle and can see why. Michael Chriton's first novel is a dated medical thriller dealing with the death of a young girl by an illegal abortion (the book was written in 1969). Thoroughly unlikable narrator, way too many characters and medical jargon, and a convoluted and confusing plot. Obviously his writing improved with age as demonstrated in his later novels like Disclosure and Rising Sun.

This book started really well. There was a dead patient, a daughter of a famous doctor and a friend of the protagonist was accused doing the abortion that led to the death of the patient.
It was intriguing (though I am not sure that a layman could enjoy reading it uninterrupted without consulting google or dictionary) and the plot was built really well.
Half through the book, I have to admit that I couldn't put it down until I finished
My problem with this book is there was some unsolved mysteries (or maybe it is just me) at the end and there were so many characters that I constantly have to read it back and forth to figure out who is this person he's calling.
Overall, a solid book but not my favorite Michael Crichton's fiction (that award goes to either Sphere, State of Fear, or the Great Train Robbery).

An entertaining, if anachronistic, debut novel that shows the talents Crichton would develop to great success.

Michael Crichton's 1968 pseudonymous novel written after had had completed his medical residency shows how stupid-talented Crichton actually was. While at Harvard medical school, Crichton wrote *seven* novels and this won him an award for best mystery. The basic plot is that a pathologist John Berry tries to clear the name of a fellow doctor who has been accused of murder in the death of a young woman (and daughter of a prominent medical family) who died following a botched abortion.

As this takes place in the pre-Roe v Wade era, abortion is largely illegal so there's a good deal of "hush-hush" about the procedure and the professional implications of those doctors that would perform abortions. It's an interesting backdrop but not one that Crichton spends too much time on (this isn't a moral pro-life/pro-choice tale). Other dated aspects are the casual references to "Negroes" and the general late 60s Boston "urban" environment. It's definitely a novel of its time in that regard.

Otherwise it's a competent medical mystery/thriller that is filled with enough medical jargon to choke a donkey. On the one hand, it's clear Crichton knows what he's talking about (or does he? I don't know, I'm not a doctor), but it also feels like "big-wordism" where an author baffles you with bullshit that you take them at their word. It's not as bad as sci-fi novels using "quantum" or "nano" to explain away random plot-holes, but it has that feel at times. The reader has no basis to judge Crichton's increasingly mumbo-jumbo'd jargon.

Jargon aside, our pathologist Berry runs around town over the course of a VERY BUSY three days meeting all sorts of interesting (and uninteresting) characters trying to solve the mystery of how young Karen Randall bled to death (it gets solved in the last 10 pages). The mystery is there even if the pacing of the novel never quote generates a full head of steam.

Where the book is really of value is in seeing Crichton's early talents in crafting a fairly taut, technology-based thriller.

Michael Chricton's Edgar Award-winning debut novel under the pseudonym of Jeffery Hudson (one of two he used). Published in 1968 (the year before I started medical school). This fast-paced medical mystery tackles abortion when it was illegal five years before Roe v. Wade. Fascinating glimpse into an earlier era of medicine, when doctors (all men) smoked, enjoyed high-income privileged lifestyles while leaving most hospital care to neophyte residents, interns, and medical students; where all physicians took turns staffing the EW ("Emergency Ward") before the specialty of emergency medicine emerged; a world where the N- and O- words were commonplace, and non-whites (even highly competent physicians) were treated with suspicion. In spite of the anachronisms, the constants in medical pathology, criminal investigation, and social controversy give this engaging mystery a timeless quality.