Robin Cook: Shock

From the Publisher:
Deborah Cochrane and Joanna Meissner, graduate science students and close friends, spot a campus newspaper ad that promises to solve their financial problems: an exclusive, highly profitable fertility clinic on Boston's North Shore is looking for egg donors. Deborah and Joanna figure they can do a good deed - help infertile couples - and earn money. Although rumors of a fellow student donor's unexplained disappearance surface, the duo is not deterred.

The procedures seem to go smoothly. Deborah is particularly intrigued by the technology involved and by Dr. Spencer Windgate, the charismatic fertility expert responsible for the clinic's success. But second thoughts and curiosity prompt the two women to find out more about the fate of their donated eggs. Stymied by the clinic's veil of secrecy, Deborah and Joanna obtain employment there to continue their probe. Working under aliases, they soon discover the horrifying aims of Dr. Windgate's research, immediately putting their lives - and their sanity - irrevocably at risk.

Posited on up-to-the-minute science, Shock finds Robin Cook at the uncertain crossroads of medical technology and ethics.

Robin Cook: Shock. Berkley Publishing Group; ISBN: 042518286X (September, 2002), 352 p., $7.99.