Robin Cook Books in Order (Coma, Viral, Pandemic, Night Shift)

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All of Robin Cook’s Books!

Who is Robin Cook?

Born on May 4th, 1940, Robin Cook is an American writer of medical thrillers. He attended Wesleyan University and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons before completing his postgraduate medical study at Harvard.

Cook began to write while serving on the Polaris submarine USS Kamehameha during the Vietnam War. His first published book, The Year of The Intern, was a failure, but it didn’t discourage Cook. After that, he decided to study bestsellers to find how the reader was manipulated by the reader and used all those techniques in his book, Coma. He then found success, as his second book became one of his most famous and has been adapted twice: the first one in a movie by Michael Crichton in 1978 and a second time in a two-part miniseries in 2012.

Robin Cook’s books mix medical facts with fantasy. He explores with his stories various medical subjects such as organ donation and transplantation, fertility treatment, in vitro fertilization, genetic engineering, research funding, managed care, medical malpractice, medical tourism, and drug research.

How to read Robin Cook’s Books in Order?

The Dr. Marissa Blumenthal series

Outbreak (1987) – Murder and intrigue reach epidemic proportions when a devastating plague sweeps the country. Dr. Marissa Blumenthal of the Atlanta Centers for Disease Control investigates-and soon uncovers the medical world’s deadliest secret…
Vital Signs (1991) – Pediatrician Melissa Blumenthal will try any scientific method available to conceive–until the horrible secrets of an urban clinic erupt in a nightmare of staggering proportions…

The Jack Stapleton & Laurie Montgomery series

Jack Stapleton & Laurie Montgomery are two pathologists who work to solve various medical mysteries. For more details, go to the Jack Stapleton & Laurie Montgomery reading order.

Blindsight (1991)
Contagion (1996)
Chromosome 6 (1997)
Vector (1999)
Marker (2005)
Crisis (2006)
Critical (2007)
Foreign Body (2008)
Intervention (2009)
Cure (2010)
Pandemic (2018)
Genesis (2019)
Night Shift (2022)
Manner of Death (2023)

The Pia Grazdani series

Death Benefit (2011) -Pia Grazdani is an exceptional yet aloof medical student working closely with Columbia University Medical Center’s premier scientist on cutting-edge research that could revolutionize health care by creating replacement organs for critically ill patients. But when tragedy strikes in the lab, Pia, with the help of infatuated classmate George Wilson, must investigate the unforeseen calamity in the hospital’s supposedly secure biosafety lab.
Nano (2012) – After a tumultuous year, Pia Grazdani decides to take a year off from her medical studies and escape New York City. Intrigued by the promise of the burgeoning field of medical technology and the chance to clear her head, Pia takes a job at Nano, LLC, a lavishly funded, security-conscious nanotechnology institute in the picturesque foothills of the Rockies. But the corporate campus is a place of secrets. And when Pia encounters a fellow employee on a corporate jogging path, suffering the effects of a seizure, she soon realizes she may have literally stumbled upon Nano LLC’s human guinea pigs.

Robin Cook’s Stand-alone novels

The Year of the Intern (1972) – The nurse’s voice on the phone is desperate, but young Dr. Peters, in his first weeks of internship, is only bone-tired and a little afraid. He has forgotten when he last slept. Yet he knows that in the coming hours he will have to make life-or-death decisions regarding patients, assist contemptuous surgeons in the operating room, deal with nurses who may know more than he does, cope with worried relatives and friends of the injured and ill, and pretend at all times to be what he has not yet become–a fully qualified doctor.
Coma (1977) – Susan Wheeler is a third-year medical student working as a trainee at Boston Memorial Hospital. Two patients during her residency mysteriously go into comas immediately after their operations due to complications from anesthesia. Susan begins to investigate the causes behind both of these alarming comas.
Sphinx (1979) – No one had known the great golden Pharaoh existed. Erica Baron, an expert Egyptologist, is the first to recognize his dangerous beauty. And as others join the chase, she is the first to feel the fear. Fear of a Pharoah’s secrets. Fear of the greed and evil her discovery will unveil . . .

Brain (1980) – Two doctors suspect something is very wrong at the enormous medical center where they work. And soon they will put their careers–and their lives–in deadly jeopardy, as they penetrate the eerie inner sanctums of a medical world gone mad.
Fever (1982) – When the family of a research physician succumbs to a fiendishly virulent disease, he becomes an outcast from the medical establishment, but determines to search for a cure for his daughter’s leukemia
Godplayer (1983) – Cassandra Cassidy, a beautiful psychiatrist, attempts to stop the mysterious killings of terminally ill patients as she struggles to save her crumbling marriage to Thomas Kingsley, a charismatic cardiac surgeon

Mindbend (1985) – Adam, a third-year medical student, fights to save his wife Jennifer and their unborn child from the overwhelming evil he uncovers at Arolen Pharmaceuticals
Mortal Fear (1988) – A harrowing medical nightmare on the cutting edge of genetic research, Mortal Fear goes into the controversial future of modern medicine. At a large Boston clinic, a world-class biologist stumbles upon a miraculous discovery, a major scientific breakthrough. Soon, healthy, middle-aged patients are dying of old age. And the ultimate experiment in terror begins…
Mutation (1989) – On the forefront of surrogate parenting and genetic research, it is the explosive tale of a brilliant doctor who sought to create the son of his dreams–and invented a living nightmare…

Harmful Intent (1989) – It should have been a routine childbirth. But somehow, the mother died in the delivery, the baby was born brain-damaged, and Jeffrey Rhodes, the anesthesiologist, is running for his life. Charged with malpractice, he is found guilty of harmful intent and reckless disregard for human life. To clear his name, Rhodes must follow a fugitive trail into the heart of a medical nightmare. A trail that, for some, may end in suicide–and for others, in the most shocking conspiracy of our time…
Terminal (1992) – At a prestigious Florida medical center, brain cancer patients are treated with a one-hundred-percent success rate. Sean Murphy, a young medical student, finds it hard to believe. Is it a miracle cure? Or the biggest con job in the history of medicine?
Fatal Cure (1994) – Leaving their urban hospital for a modern medical facility in Bartlet, Vermont, Doctors Angela, and David Wilson begin to notice puzzling details in the deaths of several terminal patients there.

Acceptable Risk (1995) – Neuroscientist Edward Armstrong has managed to isolate a psychotropic drug with a strange and dark history–one that may account for the public hysteria during the Salem witch trials. In a brilliant designer-drug transformation, it is developed into an antidepressant with truly startling therapeutic capabilities. But who can be sure the drug is safe for consumers? Who defines the boundaries of “normal” human behavior? And if the drug’s side effects are proven to be dangerous–even terrifying–how far will the medical community go to alter their standards of.
Invasion (1997) – To anyone glancing upwards at the night sky, it would have seemed like a brilliant shooting star, but moments later electronic equipment began to spark and explode throughout the city. A deadly threat to life on Earth – from the icy vastness of outer space – invasion.
Toxin (1998) – Newly divorced surgeon Dr. Kim Regis is determined to remain a good father to his only son, Selden. On a special night out, Kim takes Seldon to his favorite fast-food restaurant for a feast of burgers and fries. But the good time turns to tragedy: the young boy becomes gravely ill and dies as a result of poisoning by E. coli. bacteria found in the meat. Was Seldon’s death a result of shoddy food-handling practices? Or was it a sophisticated case of product tampering – by a rival fast-foot giant or a disgruntled employee? Or perhaps by someone with a score to settle with Kim?

Abduction (2000) – A mysterious transmission from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean leads a crew of oceanographers and divers to a phenomenon beyond scientific understanding – a discovery that will change everything we know about life on Earth . . .
Shock (2001) – Two graduate students decide to solve their financial problems by becoming egg donors at an exclusive, highly profitable fertility clinic on Boston’s North Shore. But second thoughts and curiosity prompt the two women to find out more about their donated eggs. Obtaining employment at the clinic under aliases, they soon discover the horrifying aims of its research, immediately putting their lives-and their sanity-irrevocably at risk…
Seizure (2003) – A clash between an ultra-conservative senator and a stem cell researcher escalates to violent levels when each man’s greedy ambitions get the better of him, a situation that is further complicated when the senator, who is succumbing to Parkinson’s, undergoes an unproven procedure and develops temporal lobe epilepsy.

Cell (2014) – The smartphone is poised to take on a new role in medicine, no longer as a mere medical app but rather as a fully customizable personal physician capable of diagnosing and treating even better than the real thing. It is called iDoc.George Wilson, M.D.’s initial collision with this incredible innovation is devastating. He awakens one morning to find his fiancée dead in bed alongside him, not long after she participated in an iDoc beta test. Then several of his patients die after undergoing imaging procedures. All of them had been part of the same beta test. Is it possible that iDoc is being subverted by hackers-and that the U.S. government is involved in a cover-up? Despite threats to both his career and his freedom, George relentlessly seeks the truth, knowing that if he’s right, the consequences could be lethal.
Host (2015) – Devastated by the death of her boyfriend after a routine surgery, fourth-year medical student Lynn Pierce investigates the accident and discovers a string of suspicious deaths at the hospital. By the #1New York Times best-selling author of Coma.
Charlatans (2017) – Newly minted chief resident at Boston Memorial Hospital Noah Rothauser is swamped in his new position, from managing the surgical schedules to dealing with the fallouts from patient deaths. Known for its medical advances, the famed teaching hospital has fitted several ORs as “hybrid operating rooms of the future”–an improvement that seems positive until an anesthesia error during a routine procedure results in the death of an otherwise healthy man. With his own job and credibility now in jeopardy, Noah must decide which doctor is at fault and who he can believe–before any more lives are lost.

Viral (2021) – Trying to find some normalcy during the Covid-19 pandemic, Brian Murphy and his family are on a summer excursion in Cape Cod when his wife, Emma, comes down with concerning flu-like symptoms. But their leisurely return home to New York City quickly becomes a race to the local hospital as she suddenly begins seizing in the car. At the ICU, she is diagnosed with eastern equine encephalitis, a rare and highly lethal mosquito-borne viral disease seemingly caught during one of their evening cookouts. Complicating the situation further, Brian and Emma’s young daughter then begins to exhibit alarming physical and behavioral symptoms, too.

If you like Robin Cook, you may also want to check out Michael Palmer, Patricia Cornwell, or Jefferson Bass. Don’t hesitate to follow us on Twitter or Facebook to discover more book series.

Robin Cook Books in Order (Coma, Viral, Pandemic, Night Shift)

Who is Robin Cook?