Political Suicide by Michael Palmer

Published by St. Martin's Press on December 11, 2012 

Michael Palmer writes medical/political thrillers. While the world of medicine offers ample opportunity for drama, Palmer makes the puzzling choice to focus the plot of Political Suicide on secret military missions in which medicine (or, more aptly, chemistry) plays only a tangential role. Since the plot is derivative, far-fetched, and well removed from what Palmer does best, Political Suicide is one of his lesser works.

The prologue describes three marines on a suicide mission in Afghanistan. The main story shifts from 2003 to the present, where marines from the same unit (Mantis) are preparing for something called Operation Talon.

Most of the novel, of course, centers on the hero of the series, Dr. Lou Welcome. Gary McHugh, the favored physician of D.C. celebrities and politicians, has been having an affair with a congressman's wife. The last time he visited the congressman's house, he discovered the congressman's dead body, the victim of an execution. Knowing he is about to be arrested for murder, he asks his friend Welcome for help. The Mantis story connects to McHugh's when we learn that one of the congressman's sons was a marine who died in Afghanistan.

Welcome and McHugh's feisty lawyer, Sarah Cooper, both want to help McHugh, leading to an inevitable clash of personalities and, inevitably if unconvincingly, to romance. Welcome's efforts to uncover the truth about the congressman's death are frustrated by highly placed military and government officials who want to keep it buried -- and who try to assure that Welcome is buried.

For the sake of enjoying the story, I was willing to accept that Welcome repeatedly avoids capture and death when he's being stalked by military commandos, armed desperadoes, and an attack dog. Other aspects of the plot are more troubling. It makes no sense that Welcome and his friends would take it upon themselves to stop Operation Talon, once they know the truth about it, rather than blowing the whistle and letting the authorities deal with it. The pharmaceutical foundation of Operation Talon is familiar ground, well-plowed by other thriller writers. The operational aspect, on the other hand, is just plain silly. I can accept a certain amount of silliness for the sake of a good thriller, but the notion that an elite military unit could plan and train for a mission like Operation Talon without whistles being blown is preposterous. The truth would certainly come out after the fact, if not before, and its career-ending nature would dissuade its creators from ever implementing the scheme.

Dr. Welcome works part-time for the Physicians Wellness Office, helping doctors with alcohol or drug addictions earn reinstatement of their licenses. Readers of Oath of Ofice will be familiar with Welcome's recovery mantra and with his disapproval of his boss' belief that all addicted doctors should engage in extensive psychotherapy. There is little need to cover that ground again, but Michael Palmer seems inclined to use his novels to deliver a message -- over and over -- whether or not it advances the plot. His proselytizing for AA becomes wearisome, and Welcome's frequent mentions of his successful struggle with addiction come across as self-aggrandizing smugness. Fortunately, Palmer set aside the lectures in the novel's second half.

I give Palmer credit for giving the plot an unexpected twist at the end and for keeping the story moving at a brisk pace. He is a capable writer and the novel is an easy read. If he writes another Lou Welcome novel, however, I hope he focuses on the drama of medicine and avoids improbable, overworked thriller plots.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Oath of Office by Michael Palmer

Published by St. Martin's Press on February 14, 2012

The doctors in Oath of Office aren’t Marcus Welby.  They have problems.  Serious problems.  Dr. John Meacham, fearful of losing his license after yelling at yet another patient, kills seven people in his office before trying to kill himself -- a fairly clear violation of the Hippocratic Oath, to which the title refers.  Dr. Lou Welcome’s license was once suspended for self-prescribing amphetamines.  Having been helped through recovery by a physician’s wellness program, Welcome took a part-time job with the program in addition to his part-time position in an ER.  Meacham was one of Welcome’s clients.  Welcome is now in trouble with his boss, who blames Welcome for failing to demand more aggressive treatment of Meacham’s mental instability.  When the doctors treating Meacham all behave negligently, when Meacham’s widow endangers Welcome with her bizarrely fixated behavior, and when a chef at a local eatery sticks his thumb on a chopping block, Welcome begins to wonder whether the whole town has gone batty.

Developing alongside Welcome’s story is one involving the president, his wife, and a disgraced Secretary of Agriculture who resigned after being photographed with a naked teenage girl inside a motel room.  The First Lady rather bizarrely agrees to assist an unknown Mystery Man in an effort to clear the SecAg’s name and obtain his reinstatement to his former position.  To reveal how these two storylines converge would risk spoiling a clever plot; suffice it to say that you might learn more about agriculture than you knew before you began reading.

Oath of Office pairs a medical mystery with a story of political intrigue.  The plot is intellectually engaging and sufficiently fast moving to keep thriller fans happy.   The story seems plausible (an increasing rarity in the world of thrillers) although I’m not a scientist and might be easily fooled.  The source of the bizarre behavior isn’t much of a mystery; it’s fairly obvious by the novel’s midway point.  There are times when the villains do remarkably stupid things for the sake of moving the plot along, but those lapses of logic are forgivable.  An improbable romantic subplot neither adds nor detracts from the story.  A couple of plot twists toward the end are nifty if not entirely unexpected.  One of the final scenes will appeal to fans of gruesome.

Michael Palmer’s characters are adequate if not particularly memorable.  Characters who attend AA and reverently recite the serenity prayer are standard fixtures in thrillers.  Like many of those characters, Welcome is a bit too self-righteous about his day-to-day sobriety.  However justified it might be in the real world, pride is a deadly sin when exhibited in fiction.

The dialog Palmer gives to members of the medical community is convincing.  Dialog spoken by streetwise characters suggests that Palmer has spent more time in an office than hanging out on the streets.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Palmer’s best scenes showcase Welcome’s skillful response to medical emergencies.  Those passages are captivating, filled with tension and urgency.  The rest of the novel is written in a capable if unremarkable prose style.  One of the primary action scenes is unoriginal:  any thriller set in the heartland seems to feature characters running through a cornfield while being chased by a thresher.  A couple of times the narrative gets bogged down in discussions about the efficacy of AA versus psychotherapy as a treatment for substance abuse.  Recovery wonks might find the discussions fascinating but I thought they were distracting.  Fortunately those shortcomings are more than offset by Palmer’s creative story.  On the strength of its plot and its fast-moving action, Oath of Office is a novel that most thriller fans (not just medical thriller fans) should enjoy.

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