A Perilous Conception by Larry Karp

Published by Poisoned Pen Press on December 6, 2011

It's 1976. In vitro fertilization is in its infancy and Dr. Colin Sanford has a plan: teaming with embryologist Giselle Hearns, Sanford wants to earn his fame and fortune by producing the first baby conceived in vitro. The plan is going well -- Sanford's patient, Joyce Kennett, is pregnant -- when a lab supervisor blackmails Sanford, threatening to expose his clandestine research before he's ready to reveal it to the world. Sanford's plan really turns sour on the day he intends to announce the successful birth of the first child to be fertilized in vitro. Before the press conference can be held, Hearns is shot to death, the victim of a murder-suicide committed by Joyce's husband, James Kennett. In the meantime, the blackmailer has gone missing. It falls to Detective Bernard Baumgartner to piece together the various components of the mystery. Except it's not much of a mystery: James' motivation for killing Hearns becomes apparent in chapter four although it's not revealed until the final chapter.

I don't need to like the characters in order to enjoy a novel but both Baumgartner and Sanford are such insufferable jerks that it's difficult to care about their actions. Baumgartner has a self-righteous attitude that is probably intended to make him heroic, but he instead comes across as annoying. Only readers who worship the police, who think it's fine for a cop to break the law, will find anything admirable about Baumgartner. A Dirty Harry attitude, while a bit stale, might at least make a law enforcement character interesting, but that isn't the case with Baumgartner. He's nothing more than a trite clone of the rogue cop whose warped sense of duty overshadows the rest of his boring life. Anyone with the intelligence and resources of Sanford would have laughed at Baumgartner's outlandish attempts to be intimidating.

The plot of A Perilous Conception is slightly more interesting than the characters but it didn't grab me (although a reader with a stronger interest in the history of medicine might have a more positive reaction). The plot hinges on Sanford telling Baumgartner a series of lies that he has no reason to tell. For long stretches, the story is slow moving -- too much exposition, too little action. Fortunately, the pace picks up toward the end.

A plot twist that might have been intended as shocking (or at least titillating) is closer to silly. I know the novel is set in 1976, but it reads as if it were written in 1976 and has been sitting on a shelf for thirty-plus years. On the other hand, another plot twist -- this one occurring toward the novel's end -- worked as intended: it surprised me while adding much needed life to the story. A final, over-the-top surprise, concerning a subplot about Sanford's childhood, adds nothing. The ending is equally over-the-top.

Larry Karp's writing style is capable, although it is marred by unnatural dialog and a dependence on clichéd phrases. The novel alternates point of view between Sanford and Baumgartner, each telling his story in the first person, but -- except for some unconvincing attempts to make Baumgartner sound like a television version of a tough guy cop -- the voices are nearly the same. Karp knows more about medical techniques than he does about police procedure: Baumgartner does things in his investigation that would never happen in the real world.

This isn't by any means an awful novel. It has its moments. Still, there is little in the plot, characters, or writing style that would encourage me to recommend it to anyone who isn't a medical history enthusiast.

NOT RECOMMENDED