Embryo by J.A. Schneider
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Embryo is subtitled as a medical thriller, but it could as easily be characterized as a romance or even science fiction. It kept me more or less entertained for a day, so it was worth the 99 cents I paid for it. It has its flaws, quite a few of them, in fact. It was much too girly for my taste with Jill, aka Dr. Raney, the main character, swooning over hunky Dr. Lavine and breaking into tears whenever a patient died or lost a baby. She’s an intern in an OB-Gyn unit and there are babies and mothers dying due to strange genetic anomalies. There may be strange experiments going on. The basic premise is an old standard, although the author gives it a new twist or two.
Plausibility isn’t in the cards for this one. Jill can get access to more kinds of information in a day than the entire FBI could in a year with a boatload of subpoenas. No one believes anything she says notwithstanding the evidence shoved in their faces. The doctors, all obstetricians, seem astounded at a detached placenta as though they’d barely heard of it in some obscure textbook even though any parent whose ever taken one of those childbirth classes has read and heard all about them. Jill ventures into, and gets lost in, ancient tunnels under the hospital where she is repeatedly attacked by large men whom she can best in a physical confrontation. You get the idea.
The amateurish writing wasn’t bad exactly, just aimed at the poorly-educated teenage girl market. There’s nothing wrong with that, I suppose. I got my money’s worth – barely.