ennis Heller is a young college student who has suffered a string of bad luck: First, a routine checkup leads to the removal of his gall bladder, and second, less than two years later, seemingly minor injuries suffered in a car crash lead to major abdominal surgery. Barely conscious, under anesthesia, he overhears his nurses talking about how to arrange his subsequent death. Escaping, he makes his way to another hospital and learns from a sympathetic doctor there that he has had a kidney and part of his liver removed. Somebody with a whole lot of money, a medical condition that requires regular organ transplants, and a minimal interest in Dennis' continuing health is using him as a spare-parts dispensary, and now seems to have imminent need for Dennis' heart and lungs.
Not knowing whom to trust, Dennis goes on the run and finds himself just a few steps ahead of murderers who have no problem killing off anybody who tries to help him. He soon seeks help from his longtime best friend, Graham, only to find out that Graham has been in on the conspiracy all along ... along with Dennis's cold and unloving foster parents. With the bodies piling up around him, Dennis begins to investigate his origins, in the hopes of tracking the organ thieves to their sponsor.
Alternate chapters follow a simultaneous investigation by Robert Krost, the bitter unloved son of sociopathic billionaire Max Krost. Max, who has always treated his trophy wife Anita and son Robert like the least of his possessions, has a habit of teasing his nominal heirs by falling ill, sinking to the very brink of death, then entering the hospital and returning to what seems perfect health. Impatient for the old bully to just hurry up and die already, so he can claim his inheritance, Robert looks into his activities ... and finds himself uncovering a nasty history filled with murder, blackmail and illicit organ transplants.
Dennis and Robert pursue separate converging investigations, seeking each other ... while a severely hurting Graham pursues his own murderous agenda.
A not-so-thrilling thriller
The Donor, which hinges on cloning and black-market organ transplants, would have been science fiction only a few short years ago, but it's now a middle-of-the-road medical thriller, whose shocking revelations seem obvious almost from the very first page. It deserves consideration from a science-fiction standpoint only because its devices were first explored within our pages, and because author Robinson has enjoyed a long and fruitful career within the field. Alas, that observation pretty much covers it.
It's not a bad book by any means; Robinson keeps things moving, using a transparent style and a facility for vivid characterization that makes it easy to care for the people involved even as the dull obviousness of the storyline makes it difficult to care about them very much. The chief problem is that this obviousness extends to more than just the premise: It may not be fatal for an experienced reader of thrillers to spot the major bad guy the instant he appears (as that can be fun), or even for an experienced reader of science fiction to know early on that this scenario will require the unveiling of clones in the woodpile, sooner or later (as that didn't hurt The Boys from Brazil); but it is pretty bad to recognize a longtime best friend as subsidiary bad guy not just before he utters his first line of dialogue, but the very first time he's even referenced: on page two. Add to that the dual protagonists, with their dual investigations, a device that would ratchet up the suspense of a more labyrinthine thriller but that here means they both take far too long to connect the dots before they finally link up, and you're left with a book that seems to spend most of its length just spinning wheels.
What's good about it? Well, there's a gay bookstore employee named Michael, who lost a partner on Sept. 11 and is driven by his sense of responsibility toward friends to shelter Dennis at considerable risk to himself. There's the nasty measure Dennis takes against his onetime best friend, Graham, during an interlude in Alaska. There's another nasty measure Dennis takes against the surgeon who performed the operations. There's Robert's complicated relationship with a junkie medical student, a genuinely unexpected twist involving Robert's girlfriend Kris, the sad and pathetic personality of Robert's mother Anita, excellent characterization in retrospect of a character dead before the story opens, well-drawn local color in San Francisco, Anchorage and Boston and a number of cliffhangers. The book has any number of entertaining small touches. They suffice to keep the novel from emerging as a total loss. But its engine sputters.
