The Fifth Vial | South China Morning Post

Michael Palmer writes about what he knows - and cares about. A doctor turned writer who practised internal and emergency medicine, he places organ harvesting under surgical lights in his rollicking thriller The Fifth Vial.

In case readers fail to gauge his position on the issue, he points out in the author's note that it takes only one donor's organs and tissue to improve or save the lives of up to 50 people. But the book doesn't labour the point. Rather it uses layman's science to highlight ethical issues connected with organ theft and weaves a narrative around three main characters via a vial of blood. Student Natalie Reyes is suspended from Harvard Medical School then sent to Rio de Janeiro where she seemingly becomes the victim of a random crime that leaves her without a lung. In Cameroon a dying Dr Joe Anson has perfected a drug that could save millions of people and make even more money. And in Chicago a detective tries to identify a John Doe whose body is found with strange puncture marks on it. There is also a nefarious group that calls itself The Guardians and is the reason for the Plato quotations that we find at the beginning of each chapter. One that is particularly apt is: 'The unexamined life is not worth living.'

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