I must say, I had a bit of difficulty choosing my book for this category. But I guess that's why it's called the ECLECTIC Reader's Challenge, huh, to make me read things that are out of my comfort zone and make my horizons more extensive (dare I say it...eclectic!). So after hours poring through Amazon shelves and Goodreads book lists, I decided to do what I do best, and go to a bookstore and wander. I ended up going with Harvest by Tess Gerritsen, a name I knew from being the mind behind the hit crime show Rizzoli and Isles (never watched, but always intrigued). I was bouncing back and forth between a few books, but when there's a quote on the back cover from thriller god Stephen King putting Gerritsen on a rank above Palmer, Cook AND Crichton (all names I'd considered for this genre), then you know it has to be good. Harvest is Gerritsen's first-ever medical thriller novel, and I opted for this one rather than any of her R&I books because I like to see how people deal with standalone stories, rather than milking a series for all it's worth (maybe I'm just jaded....thanks Sue Grafton). As it turns out, I was hella impressed.
Harvest is first and foremost about Dr. Abby DiMatteo, surgical resident at Bayside Hospital. She's got a pretty great life: just got offered a spot on the prestigious transplant team, successful live-in doctor boyfriend, everything is coming up Abby. But a fishy transplant order and a mysterious heart that appears after Abby and her friend Vivian Chao ignore the aforementioned fishy orders put abby on a path to understanding the dark and seedy underbelly of the Bayside transplant team. I am always a strong proponent of the capable, raw heroine, and I particularly loved Abby because of her flaws. She is nervous and second-guessing but still stands by her decision to supersede orders (and give the heart to the teenage boy rather than the rich middle-aged woman who was farther down on the donor list); she still pushes, trying to demystify the circumstances surrounding the appearance of the second heart that replaced the "stolen" one. It would be incredibly easy for Abby to stop, to not make waves and settle back into her perfect life--in fact, that's what Mark (the boyfriend) and the rest of the transplant team keep pushing her to do, as well as the lawsuits and the harassment that plagues her--but Abby can't help but question, she can't help but fight, and it kept me turning the page.
As a medical thriller, Harvest was indeed driven by the goings-on of Bayside and the shadows behind those everyday events. Everything felt real to me, the medicine, the dialogue, the patients--or at least it felt knowledgeable enough to create an atmosphere. I read after that Gerritsen gave up her practice to write full-time, that she used to be a physician, and this translates extremely well to the text. She offers a unique perspective with this first foray into the thriller genre, and it is certainly her familiarity with the nitty gritty part of the field that makes her leap into fiction so plausible. The hospital itself also feels real, the way the characters move through its halls and interact with their surroundings. The hospital forms a good chunk of the environment for Harvest, with short detours to wherever the other parallel story thread is tracing along, the freighter for example, and there is evidence of Abby in the outside world, but I do think one of the reasons this works so well as a medical thriller is that predominant hospital vibe, this little insular world that Abby is chipping her way into, maybe down far past where she should've been content with her position. This singularity also leads into another element that worked well, which is the paranoia, the conspiracy feel of the text. Well, alleged conspiracy. I make this distinction because there is an entirely different feel whether you are in on a conspiracy or not, and it would change the whole dynamic. Abby DiMatteo is decidedly not in on the conspiracy: she pokes at it softly, unintentionally, and her paranoia builds as that which she is poking reacts in ways outside of the ordinary. The focus on Abby as the protagonist, even with the third-person-singular tone of narration, allows that paranoia to blossom as well, showing only Abby's experiences and reactions to the thickening plot. While there are a number of departures-- most notably those of Yakov as the parallel player on the other side of the transplant table; and Katzka, the detective who doesn't feel right about Levy's death and ends up bringing the two halves together.
In fact, these departures and the figures that carried them marked a bit of a tip-off for me that something was not quite right. It is clear, for the storytelling purposes, that Yakov needed his say, as the expansion of his story knitted shut the gap between eerie conspiracy and cold steel reality, but when Katzka's voice came into play, I questioned things. I knew that Mark was somehow involved with something he was not telling Abby, but the fact that a relatively new player like Katzka was allowed to weigh in before the protagonist's boyfriend cemented my theory that perfect Mark wasn't all that perfect. A lot can be said about foil characters, and an outsider's perspective of Abby, and the fresh set of eyes that cracks the case, but I found it unsettling, all the same. As is the way with parallel storylines, some portion of the reader's brain acknowledges that these scenes are meant to inform each other, that they will knit together in various ways by the end of the novel, and as each Yakov scene cropped back up, I felt more and more reminded of this connection. Yakov's contributions to the narrative were few and far between, almost to the point where they surprised me when I turned a page expecting a continuation of Abby's situation and was faced with a one-handed little Russian boy getting into things he shouldn't. It was interesting the way that they finally met, the horrific finality of the coming together. I suppose through my years of consuming thrillers (not horror--that is a different ending concept entirely), I have become used to, almost expectant of, the last-second save, the pinprick and then the door bursting open for the rescue, that this ending was disconcerting. (If you haven't gathered by now, I am no stranger to spoilers, so beware with the next few sentences if you ever wanted to read this book with fresh eyes).It was disconcerting to say the least, when Mark actually sliced into Abby's abdomen, administers the drugs and the retractors and all the other trappings of an organ harvest ON HIS OWN FIANCEE before the lights flicker. And in the end, it was not some big blaring rescue: it was a small, one-handed Russian boy with ingenuity and dedication who set the boat on its path to redemption and justice. After Abby is cut open, around page 502, Abby is no longer present in the narration. She is barely referred to by name for the rest of the scene, and she barely regains consciousness for the rest of the book. The last page finds her lying asleep in a hospital bed, recovering, with Katza and Yakov returning to her side, some inexplicable bond drawing them back, a purely human connection forged in distress and danger. Our protagonist is not with us at the close of the book, but somehow, we are still allowed to feel a sense of resolution. Not because she escaped and caught the bad guy single-handedly with nary a shed tear, but because she went through hell and back and managed to find trust in the most inexplicable places, and that everything might actually be alright in the end.
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