The protagonist of Bellevue is Mitt Fuller, a recent medical school graduate beginning his first-year residency at Bellevue. His choice of residency location is personal; several ancestors of his were prominent doctors at Bellevue over the past three centuries. Mitt’s residency gets off to a horrible start. He assists with several surgeries and consults on other patients. Unfortunately, the first seven patients under his care in any way all die within a couple of days of surgery. Some of them were seriously ill, but others had routine surgery and then developed sudden, bizarre complications.

To make matters worse, Mitt has strange visions. He starts seeing phantoms who look like horribly disfigured patients from decades or centuries earlier. Mitt had always had psychic feelings, but nothing like the horrifying images he now experiences. One vision is particularly distinct: a young girl holding an unusual medical instrument in one hand. In the book’s prologue, readers learn this girl died in 1949 as a result of a botched lobotomy performed by Mitt’s great-grandfather, Dr. Clarence Fuller, a prominent Bellevue psychiatrist of that era. Clarence used the same instrument to perform the lobotomy that the girl now holds. As Mitt investigates his distinguished ancestors further, he learns that they all eschewed medical advances of their time, such as using anesthesia or sterilizing the surgical theater before operations. Mitt guesses the visions he’s seeing are other patients who died as a result of his ancestors’ malpractice.

Robin Cook’s strength as a writer is his ability to make complex medical situations comprehensible for lay readers. As a result, the first half of Bellevue is not just enjoyable, but also highly engaging, even if Mitt’s patients don’t fare well. Cook describes operations, post-operative rounds, and emergency resuscitation efforts so that readers feel they are in the same room. (The hospital’s crash cart stays very busy one night.) The author also provides insight into Mitt’s personal life (primarily the lack thereof) during the week the book covers. Mitt lives within easy walking distance of the hospital but only gets there rarely. Instead, he’s on call most of the time that he’s not in surgery, so he tries to catch a couple of hours of sleep in the residents’ lounge. He also visits the 24-hour hospital cafeteria at all hours of the night to grab something to eat when he can.

I would have been happy to follow Mitt through his entire surgical rotation with Robin Cook as my tour guide. However, the author has other ideas. As Bellevue progresses, so do Mitt’s visions. In that regard, Robin Cook is not as good at describing supernatural phenomena as medical complications. His writing is too rooted in the real world to make his flights of ghoulish fancy seem plausible within the bounds of a horror story. Cook does his best to create atmosphere by sending Mitt to the abandoned psychiatric hospital late at night to get additional records about some former patients. The atmosphere here is suitably creepy, thanks to the author’s description of the building’s distinctive architecture. However, the payoffs readers expect in horror stories never arrive.

The author also employs a very annoying plot device two-thirds of the way through Bellevue. While eating a post-midnight meal in the cafeteria one night, Mitt meets the late shift’s maintenance supervisor. This woman serves as an information dump to fill in all the plot details Mitt and readers were unaware of previously. She also conveniently has access to the old building, where vital records are stored. (Her explanation of why she can’t just bring the records out to Mitt never makes much sense.) She shares Mitt’s psychic gifts as well, which is another plot device the author never adequately explains. Apparently, Mitt gets bad vibes and hears and smells things when he’s near a place where something terrible occurred in the past. (At Bellevue, that could describe most of the hospital.)

As the novel progressed, I noticed that Bellevue was running out of pages, and the storyline didn’t seem to be wrapping up. I hoped the author wouldn’t end the book on some sort of cliffhanger. I was right in that regard, but the actual ending was worse. The author clearly intended to shock readers. However, while the book’s conclusion was gruesome, it wasn’t a big surprise, and it felt like a cop-out after the author had run out of ideas on finishing the book.

Bellevue was a major disappointment for me. The book’s first half was informative and sometimes gripping, providing entertaining insight into a first-year surgical resident’s arduous routine. However, the second half often resembled a mediocre self-published horror novel too frequently found on Amazon. There’s a tremendous medical novel lurking within the corridors of Bellevue Hospital, but Bellevue isn’t it. My prescription for Robin Cook is to get some rest, stick to medicine, and leave the horror to professionals.

NOTE: The publisher graciously provided me with a copy of this book through NetGalley. However, the decision to review the book and the contents of this review are entirely my own.