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Greedy drugs companies and remote native tribes in the Amazon collide in April Christofferson's pacy medical thriller Patent To Kill. Christofferson's plot idea is a gem, featuring biopiracy where ruthless businesses steal folk medicine and cures from remote tribes. And the book, despite a number of flaws, is a high on atmosphere page-turner. The book is compelling in the South American scenes when would-be whistle-blower Dr Jake Skully and his unsavoury travelling companions are dodging death and all manner of dangers from unfriendly natives and marauding wildlife as they journey down river and through jungles to find a lost tribe. This mysterious tribe may be able to provide them with a miracle cure for blindness, but Skully is horrified to find that his colleagues are exploiting and murdering natives for their DNA samples. But the main problem in a firmly plot-driven book is that the reader never engages with the characters. Too little is revealed about them early on, and by the time Christofferson gets around to doling out meagre portions of information, it's almost too late. So it's hard to raise much enthusiasm for the plight of Skully and his sons or for Asahel Sullivan, the activist-turned-reluctant businesswoman, as they are so underdrawn. Asahel's character has a lot of possibilities, but ends up as little more than a cipher. And we need to know far more about Skully and what makes him tick. He might just as well have been parachuted into the Amazon for all the reader is told of his background -- and that's a problem when the reader is expected to empathise with him following the mysterious death of his wife, despite a throwaway line that he has had an affair with a work colleague. The rushed ending to a slick tale is a disappointment after the atmosphere and horror of those Amazon scenes. And Christofferson's tendency to pile on the twists in the final few pages had me rolling my eyes and muttering 'yeah, right!'
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, October 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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