The Doctor

I didn't finish reading the book. As soon as it started about dogs & cats being killed for experimentation, I knew I didn't want to read anymore.

I’m used to novels by Michael Crichton types, where intense research is done into the main premise of the book, “cryology” in this case. In this book it seems as if the author just sat down, with no knowledge of anything she was writing about, and wrote. The book is pretty funny in how dumb it is. There is this evil doctor who is interested in immortality through being frozen to -190 degrees C until a cure can be found for his genetic disease, and then he can be brought back to life again. Although he doesn’t like his wife, he wants HER to also undergo cryology, but she refuses to sign for it. Thus he begins to experiment in his own lab in an old garden shed. He then focuses his murderous intentions on a nosey neighbor who befriends his abused wife. One other pretty ghastly element of this story is that the evil doctor is trying to impress his parents by being the first to revive a human after the human is preserved, thereby making them “proud”. So the author insults a whole branch of medicine by telling us that this evil doctor, who was not interested in medicine, and did poorly in med school and internship, was forced by his stupidity to become an anesthesiologist! Or an anesthetist in the UK. I’m sure any doctor in this field would not like to know his specialty is for dumb doctors, according to the author! Read this book for its unintended humor. It certainly is no international thriller.

Very Suspenseful and Scary.Not to give anything away, but the Doctor next door is NOT dealing with a full deck ! He has a crazy agenda that he needs to fill, making him psychotic and cruel. The goal the Doctor wants to achieve is very interesting and creepy, nothing I have ever read before....Parts of the story are very disturbing, they were difficult to read. Pure Torture and Agony, very Scary..... But the impact added to the story, making it a Great Thriller.This story I will not soon forget.The Author did a Great job, thinking up this one ! 👍

In East of Eden, John Steinbeck worried about whether truly evil people could exist as he had created such a character. He concluded they could exist. There is one psychotic evil man in this novel, but the extent of his evil is slowly revealed. His next door neighbor, Emily is perhaps too naive and one can't help feel sorry for his timid wife. The man wants to become famous for his technique of freezing the recently deceased and bringing them back to life partly due to his wife's illness.

Just when you think you know what's going to happen there is a twist. I found myself yelling out loud at the characters. So many ups and downs your emotions are put to the test. If you like mind blowing thrillers this the book for you.

This was a pretty good read about a deranged, delusional doctor(Amit) intent on prolonging life beyond death. He has a subservient, pitiful wife Alisha and a daughter (Eve) who suffers from a debilitating disease that he informed Alisha had been inherited from her. He sets up a laboratory at the end of their garden and steals drugs from the theatre when he attends operations as the anaesthetist. His aim is to become world-famous by preserving bodies that can be brought back from the dead.Next door to them live Emily, Ben and their little boy. Despite efforts by Emily to befriend Alisha, something seems off until Alisha agrees to allow Emily to visit her without Amit knowing and to delete the recordings of her visits on the CCTV footage that Amit has installed all over.Alisha lures Emily over one evening and she gets taken hostage by Amit who intends to use her for his research.Two things really annoyed me in this book. The first was inferring that Anaesthetists are not great doctors and that this is a branch of medicine reserved for non-achievers. The second was Alisha's behaviour throughout the story but the latter was rectified at the end of the book with an interesting twist. 4 Stars.

This book is one that you can't put down! It is interesting and exciting. A must read.

How crazy can an ending be?.....too crazy for you never know who really is the psychotic one is. Most of all, if it's not you, then maybe your neighbor is.....😲

What a bizarre and warped plot idea. Not only is there child neglect/abuse and domestic violence/abuse, there’s also a demented excuse for a human being who uses people’s pets to experiment on.This individual, Dr Amit Burman, belongs to a group whose ultimate objective is to achieve immortality- to be frozen, soon after death and brought back to life years later when progress has been made to cure illness and disease. To this end Burman uses pets to practice on with the intention of moving onto humans as his experiments progress.The fact that the whole book involves cruelty towards a severely disabled, deformed child and the author expects readers to enjoy this is unbelievable and frankly insulting. That’s aside from the physical abuse metered out by the crackpot, Burman, on his wife.I’m astounded that anyone could find the storyline appealing. As well as being utterly distasteful, the plot just goes on and on and on and on........I got to halfway and couldn’t believe that there was another half of this drivel to plough through.The book is chilling but only as a reminder that some people can only achieve by sensationalism and shock.Garbage. Very bad idea and boring to the point of inducing sleep- that’s after you’ve thrown up.

Really sorry, but describing this as a crime thriller is way off the mark. It's a piece of nonsense about a doctor who has decided to investigate the possibility of cryogenically freezing his terminally ill wife. The dialogue is wooden, actions are over explained and the whole premise is ridiculous.However, this is not the worst thing about this book. There are some nasty bits of domestic violence and abuse, along with detailed descriptions of animals being killed. None of which are necessary to advance the (threadbare) plot.I gave up reading this at 32% when the vile protagonist was attempting to steal a patient from a hospital to practice his technique - it was so far-fetched that I just couldn't go on.I was amazed that the author was described as an "international bestseller", so I did some research. This led me to discover that she has written a lot of books under a different name, and on completely different subject matter. If that is where the "international bestseller" tag comes from, then it in disingenuous to say the least.Honestly, don't bother. You'd get more out of reading the ingredients list on a cereal packet.

Ben & Emily are a young couple with a new son, Robbie, Emily at home on extended maternity leave. She’s keen to get to know their neighbours, Dr Burman and his wife Alisha but Alisha is strangely subdued, barely leaving the house, and terrified of answering the phone. When Emily goes missing a few weeks later, Ben is plunged into a panic because his wife has left a note saying she’s run off with another man (having endured this, I wish that’s what she had done). Has Emily’s curiosity about the couple next door led her straight into danger?This utterly preposterous novel parts company with any sense of realism very early on and never bothers to try and close the gap. Characterisation is basic at best - we know just what we need to move a scene along - and any sense of suspense is quickly wiped out by dialogue that is perfunctory, if not humorous, making everyone sound like they’re characters in some long-forgotten sit-com. Mostly taking place in two houses and an outhouse converted into a functional medical laboratory (yes, you read that correctly), this doesn’t have any sense of place and even when another key location is introduced, it completely ignores security procedures most of us are very familiar with. The Doctor of the title is an anaesthetist because his parents wanted him to go into the medical profession but he had neither the skill nor dedication to train and that role, apparently, is the lowest rung of the professional ladder (I can’t imagine this is going to get a recommendation from the British Anaesthesia Association). This, however, doesn’t stop him (and I’m not giving away spoilers, this is discussed openly within the first handful of chapters) from not only discovering a medical procedure that has defied doctors and scientists for centuries but also performing organ transplants in his shed. To be fair, his character did at least bring some levity to the dreary writing, since one of his eyes glows (no idea how that works) and at one point he “grins fiendishly” - I wish he’d had a moustache, he could have theatrically twirled the ends of it at that point. Please don’t get the impression that this is a harkback to the pulpy novels of the 70s - or any fun at all, really - because it takes itself far too seriously for that (see the book club questions at the end) and the less said about the “twist you won’t see coming” promised on the blurb the better - if you didn’t see it coming, you hadn’t wasted a few hours reading to get to that point.Bland, unlikely, extremely unrealistic and populated by cardboard characters who forget what they’ve told each other within pages (don’t worry, they recap one another often), it’s difficult to know how anyone could recommend this. I certainly won’t.

I liked the idea of this book. New neighbours and never quite what goes on behind closed doors meant plenty of opportunity for suspense. Sadly, this was not the case, most of the plot was frankly unbelievable to the point of being absurd. The relationship between the two wives felt far too staged and the devolving of the doctor was laughable. I finished the book because I can’t leave a story unfinished, but I skimmed the last hundred pages just to get to the end. Save yourself a few hours and don’t bother with this book. I’d have given it no stars if possible. Utter tripe.

Your mileage may vary but I found it hard to like anything about this book. Flat, uninspired prose and flat characters. When I buy books I often pick a 99p extra - occasionally you get something awesome, more often you get something ok but still worth the time - this didn't fall anywhere near either. To be fair the plots not awful and the pace makes it bearable but I didn't find this a thriller. Tried. Not for me.