Nano by Robin Cook

Reading Level: Adult Fiction
Submitted by Gerti

I picked this book by Robin Cook up from the library "New Releases" shelf because I have read a number of Cook books in the past, and always liked his topics and characters.  The topic of nanotechnology holds little interest for me, however, which is why I am happy to say that Cook deals with it in a way that involves little scientific mumbo-jumbo and lots of action.

The main character is Pia Grazdni, a woman who works at a nanotechnology firm out west.  She has graduated from medical school (where she apparently solved a murder/kidnapping-story from a previous book I hadn't read) and one of her med school colleagues is in town to check up on her, for his own romantic reasons.  Cook draws her as a cold fish, however, and she is not interested in him, or any of the other male characters drawn to her smoking body and exotic looks.  She is secretly the daughter of a mobster out east who hails from Albania, and who helped her solve the previous mystery I mentioned from an earlier Cook novel.

The CEO of the company she works at is working with the Chinese to program mini-robots which increase the respiration ability of their athletes.  In the process, he is using Chinese prisoners as guinea pigs, and Pia eventually finds this out before disappearing herself.  Her former bf George works with a local doctor and then Pia's estranged mobster father to track her down, and the fact that she is not located by the end of the book is one of its huge disappointments.  While the character of Pia is not truly likeable, I kink of expect the protagonists to emerge unscathed and the evil-doers to get their just desserts, but that doesn't happen here.

So I give Cook credit for not being formulaic with this novel, but in that, it is a departure from his previous books i have read, in which the good guys win.  I wonder if it's a refection of the fact that Robin Cook has gotten older that he no longer believes in the happy ending, or if he's just setting this book up for a sequel.  Regardless, it was an entertaining ride through the world of competitive science, with a cast of characters who are sometimes stereotypical, but often just odd enough to be interesting.