The Last Surgeon Review

I received this medical thriller to review last week in the mail. Until I received it I honestly did not know that said genre of book even existed. So that being said let me start my review by saying that if you have never read a medical thriller please give Michael Palmer’s books a shot. Especially this one! I had a very difficult time putting it down to do basic everyday things like…laundry, eating, running errands, sleeping, you know basic everyday things.

The medical aliment that is centered around the book is Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. One of our main characters Dr. Nick Garrity suffers from this medical condition. Nick was a surgeon in the military and witnessed a pretty horrible incident at the medical hospital that he was working at while deployed. As a result of having Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome Nick had pretty much given up “living” and had become a shell of himself. He had given up the medical practice that he was at and pretty much all that was his life before this incident accorded. There are two things that keep him going , one is Helping Hands which is a mobile “hospital” that Nick and his nurse friend Junie run, offering medical care to those who really can’t afford to go to a regular hospital, while also helping fellow veterans try and get their veteran’s benefits. The other is his mission to find out what really happened to his Marine friend Umberto, who just up and disappeared one day four years earlier.

Our other main character, Jillian Coates, is convinced that her sisters death was not a suicide. She believes that her sister was murdered. When going through her sisters things she came across a set of comic books where the main character is Dr. Nick Fury and while on a radio show trying to get some information a caller tells her that Dr. Nick Fury isn’t just a comic book character but an actual person, Dr. Nick Garrity. Jillian and Dr. Garrity meet up and go over what they know, which at this point isn’t much, but they are convinced that the death of Jillian’s sister and the disappearance of Umberto are connected.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is a paid killer, who refers to himself as the master of the “non-kill” (the art of making a murder look like a suicide). This character is one sick S.O.B. (pardon my “french”). Over the course of the book there are several more “non-kills” that are commited that are all linked to one particular surgical procedure done on a high profile patient about 4 years prior. This procedure, we find out links Jillian’s sister to Umberto and in the end Jillian to Nick.

There’s a LOT going on in the book but it all flows well together. I have to say that my favorite part of the book was when a teenage computer hacker get’s the better of a crooked plastic surgeon. Oh, and when Jillian gets the better of the killer….That was pretty AWESOME too. Overall, this was an AWESOME read! I will definately be reading more of Michael Palmer’s books in the future!
This book was sent to me by the author.