From Publishers Weekly Gerritsen leaves the urban hospital setting of her first two successful thrillers (Harvest; Life Support) and steps into Stephen King territory?the troubled Maine town of Tranquility?with mixed results. The former doctor's ability to create credible characters and make medical details accessible and exciting provide the book's strongest moments, as Dr. Claire Elliot?recent widow from Baltimore?tries to make a go of her new life in Tranquility, where she has moved to get her son Noah, 14, away from dangerous influences. Irony of ironies: the country turns out to hold more savage dangers for the teen than the city ever did. Claire's struggles with the boy, her failure so far to win a place for herself in the hearts of prospective patients and a possible romance with the town's police chief are straightforward and moving. Harder to swallow is the book's premise?that savage outbreaks of violence among Tranquility's teenagers occur every 50-odd years, caused by natural or even supernatural factors. It's Claire who makes the connection between recent murders and older attacks, and of course there's the old "enemy of the people" subplot about not scaring off the tourist trade. The fact that Tranquility's teenage problem has a scientific solution lets Dr. Elliot have a final moment of triumph, but you can't help feeling that King would have made the story more powerful?and more fun. Major ad/promo; author tour; Doubleday Book Club and Literary Guild super release; Mystery Guild main selection; simultaneous Simon Schuster audio. From School Library Journal YA-Tranquility, ME, sounds like the perfect place for Dr. Claire Elliot to relocate with her teenage son and help him deal with his father's death. However, as she begins her practice, so begins an epidemic of teen violence. The shooting of the school biology teacher and the violent ending to the big dance have Claire and the town police chief, Lincoln Kelly, searching hard for clues and answers. Are the blue mushrooms growing in the forest where local teens hang out the cause? Or is the mysterious green phosphorescence that appears on the lake where many of the young people swim the culprit? Claire's son suddenly and mysteriously becomes as wild and uncontrollable as his friends. This is a gory medical thriller that will keep YAs totally engaged

Tess Gerritsen used to be a doctor, so it comes as no great surprise that the medical aspects of her latest thriller are absolutely convincing -- even if most of the action happens in where few doctors have ever practiced -- outer space. Dr. Emma Watson and five other hand-picked astronauts are about to take part in the trip of a lifetime -- studying living creatures in space. But an alien life form, found in the deepest crevices of the ocean floor, is accidentally brought aboard the shuttle Atlantis. This mutated alien life form makes the creatures in Aliens look like backyard pets. Soon the crew are suffering severe stomach pains, violent convulsions, and eyes so bloodshot that a gallon of Murine wouldn't help, brilliantly describes the difficulties of treating sick people a space module, and how the lack of gravity affects the process of taking blood and inserting a nasal tube. Dr. Watson does her best, but her colleagues die off one by one and the people at NASA don't want to risk bringing the platform back to earth. Only Emma's husband, doctor/astronaut himself, refuses to give up on her. As we read along, eyes popping out of our heads, all that's missing is one of bland NASA voices saying, "Houston, we have a problem -- we're being attacked by tiny little creatures that are part human, part frog, and part mouse."

For Dr. Abby DiMatteo, the road to Boston's Bayside Hospital began with a tragic accident — and the desperate, awful weeks that followed as she watched her little brother, Pete, lose his battle to live. Despite her small-town roots and lack of money, Abby pushed through college and medical school, each achievement strengthening her ambition to reach higher. Now, immersed in the grinding fatigue of her second year as a surgical resident, she's elated when the hospital' elite cardiac transplant team taps her as a potential recruit. But Abby soon makes an anguished, crucial decision that jeopardizes her entire career. A car crash victim's healthy heart is ready to be harvested; it is immediately cross-matched to a wealthy private patient, forty-six-year-old Nina Voss. Abby and chief resident Vivian Chao hatch a bold plan to make sure that the transplant goes instead to a dying seventeen-year-old boy who is also a perfect match. The repercussions are powerful and swift; Dr. Chao resigns, bowing under the combined fury of the hospital's top staff and Nina Voss's outraged husband. Abby is shaken but unrepentant — until she meets the frail, tormented Nina. Then a new heart for Nina Voss suddenly appears, her transplant is completed, and Abby makes a terrible discovery. The donor records have been falsified — Nina's heart has not come through the proper channels. Defying Bayside Hospital's demands for silence, Abby, with Vivian Chao's help, plunges into an investigation that reveals an intricate, and murderous, chain of deceptions