Deadly Harvest

""That place keeps coming up again and again, doesn't it?"" says L.A. detective Jake Sinclair about Donors International, a top-notch organ-transplant service that also runs a reproductive clinic. Unfortunately, he's right. In this subplot-crowded medical thriller by Goldberg (Deadly Care), D.I. is flagrantly callous and obviously capable of monstrous deeds from the start. From the opening scene of a sniper preparing to fire on D.I.'s reproductive clinic to the murder of a rich D.I. client, Sinclair and his ex-lover, forensic pathologist Joanna Blalock, are drawn into a puzzle that, despite fast pacing and clean writing, remains as flat and perfunctory as a paint-by-numbers landscape. Goldberg tries to generate excitement by jamming the plot circuits with such subsidiary subjects as a rivalry between the hotshot new coroner and Joanna and the details of an Ebola-like virus that has infected Joanna's sister Kate. The virus has so damaged Kate's body that she needs a new liver to survive, which sends Joanna to D.I. as a client rather than as an investigator. But since it has long been established that D.I. is capable of hiring killers to eliminate witnesses, it's hard for the reader to feel the proper shock and outrage when it is revealed that evil on a larger scale is going on. With more attention paid to unfolding the villainy of the organ snatchers, this might have been a stunner, instead of a smoothly written but static disappointment. (May)