Book Review: The Fifth Vial

Entree

It was a boring friday night, and I decided to pass by the bookstore on my 5 minute walk back home. As I paid for my weekly 'Economist' magazine, some of the fiction novels on 'highlight' caught my eye. A book I hadn't seen before was there - pristine white except for the title and a graphic of a large test tube on the cover. Many times I've passed by the same bookstore and that 'highlight' shelf without actually taking a book. The cashier, done with my purchase, asked again if there was anything else. I quickly browsed the inside flap of the new book - it was a 'medical' mystery / thriller novel. Still high on this week's excellent House M.D. Episode (3x20 - 'Family'), I pick it up and pay for it. The rest of my weekend was spent reading 'The Fifth Vial' by Michael Palmer.

Overall

An overall grade of B.

Being my first 'medical novel', it was a good read. The topic - illegal organ trafficking on the 'grandest' scale - was as good as any. The best reason I have for giving a modest 'B' was that it did not oversell itself. From the little I read on the inside flap, there was no promise of 'great adventure', 'a shocking earth-shattering secret', or 'brilliant twists and turns.' It was a medical story, and in that sense, it delivered. There was enough puzzlement at the beginning to catch my curiosity, enough emotional connection to get me through 40 chapters, and enough closure at the end that I don't feel the urge to look for a sequel. It was good storytelling.

Weaknesses

What it lacked was excellence in certain areas - namely pace, character development of antagonists, and a setting that emotionally connected.

The story's pace was both a blessing and a curse. There were sections which moved like a snail - unnecessarily repeating emotions and connections already made, and focusing too much on minute, irrelevant detail that doesn't move the story forward. However, at places the pace was quick, and on a couple of times, inventive. More on this when I talk about the pace as a strength.

While emotional rapport was certainly built between the reader and heroine and hero (though the book is certainly more a heroine than hero story), no such connection was made with the antagonists. While not necessary in all fiction, I've found that a reader who is heavily invested in both protagonist and antagonist tends to walk away from the book with a richer experience. Take Silas for example, from 'The Da Vinci Code', or Wednesday from 'American Gods'. Certainly in 'The Fifth Vial', the malicious intent of the 'Guardians' (the story's antagonists) was solidified in the first 3 chapters - hence forcing the reader to take sides too early in the story. I found this 'spoiled' some of my reading appetite; making me read mostly because I wanted to find out how the 'good guys' get to kick the 'bad guys' asses in the end. Sometimes painting the enemy with more than one color can be a rewarding investment in character development.

The setting also did not resonate with me - flashes of Boston and Texas, with most of the story happening in Brazil and Cameroon. While the description of the setting was vivid - the research center in Cameroon, the surgery hospital in Brazil -- they were just too far from conventional reality. While I felt the characters could've been real, the settings were less so.

Strengths

Many virtues of good storytelling abound also - good protagonist character development and connection, a medical narration that gave the right balance between being layman-friendly and medically-based, and so on. But one strength I found here, which I do not find in most other fiction books, was the exercise of control in telling ALL parts of a story. Instead, the reader is treated (mostly) to the important parts of the storyline, with certain events happening between the pages and chapters not written, but to be assumed and perhaps later explained in hindsight. This was creative storytelling I felt -- making the reader fill in the blanks with his own imagination, while only writing the important ones. It kept me pleasantly surprised to where and when I would find the characters next, despite their motivations being plain well beforehand (see weakness extolled earlier). A lot of other fiction writers can learn much from Michael Palmer in this redeeming writing style.

Recommendation

If you've already read most of your must-read-fiction-list and are looking for something new and fresh, I suggest you pick this one up. But if you're thinking between reading some other book you're sure you like and this one, I'd rather suggest you pick the other book you already know you like. This book is best read with no expectations, especially not versus another book you already like. But certainly, it leaves a fresh aftertaste.

Book Summary (from inside flap)
In Boston, a disgraced medical student is sent to deliver a research paper that could save her career. . . . Four thousand miles away, in a jungle hospital in Cameroon, a brilliant, reclusive scientist, dying from an incurable disease that threatens to make each tortured breath his last, is on the verge of perfecting a serum that could save millions of lives, and bring others inestimable wealth. . . . In Chicago, a disillusioned private detective, on the way to his third career, is hired to determine the identify of a John Doe, killed on a Florida highway, with mysterious marks on his body.

Three seemingly disconnected lives, surging unrelentingly toward one another. Three lives becoming irrevocably intertwined. Three lives in mounting peril, moving ever closer to the ultimate confrontation against a deadly secret society with godlike aspirations and roots in antiquity.

Medical student. Scientist. Private eye. Three people who will learn the deeper meanings of brilliance and madness, truth and deception, trust and betrayal.

Three lives linked forever by a single vial of blood—the fifth vial.