Book Review: Harvest — Tess Gerritsen

I make no apologies for being a huge fan of Tess Gerritsen’s work. Having read several of her books — The Surgeon, The Apprentice, The Sinner, and Gravity — I thought it about time I went to where it all began: Harvest. (Actually, Gerritsen published several paperback romantic suspense novels before Harvest, but Harvest is considered her first real novel, possibly due simply to genre snobbery.)

And her first offering doesn’t disappoint. Two storylines running at once, merging at the end, this novel is as well written as its successors.

The first storyline we’re introduced to happens to be the subplot, where we meet young Yakov, a streetwise Russian youth born without part of his arm, and his “brothers”, a group of young men used in various ways by a savvy older Russian, Misha, to make money — pickpocketing, rolling, petty theft, prostitution, etc. In fact, he’s selling the lot of them to Americans. And thus we follow the boys through Yakov’s eyes as they’re placed aboard a ship to be brought to America for adoption.

The second storyline and main plot follows young and promising surgical resident Abby DiMatteo. At first on the high road and fast track of success, she seems to be doing everything right, even capturing the affections of a brilliant doctor on Bayside Hospital’s excellent transplant team, of which she is asked to become part. Then she makes what appears to be a critical career error. Following her heart and personal ethics, she and fellow resident Vivian Chao, against Bayside’s directors’ express wishes and orders, gain the release of a young woman’s heart and, because Bayside has ordered the heart placed in an older patient, Nina Voss, transfers the heart to a rival hospital and has the transplant surgery performed on a teenage boy, just in time to save his life. But it is a decision Abby will regret, beginning with the power and money brought to bear on her career from Nina Voss’ husband, a multimillionaire. A chain of events threatening her life and career begin to spiral out of control for Abby until she begins to fight back after discovering a strange discrepancy in the donorship procedures where Nina Voss suddenly and miraculously gets a young heart.

Daring, cutting edge, this is a medical thriller that rivals Crichton at his best. Gerritsen is also compared to Robin Cook, who, personally, this critic believes is a hack who can type (albeit most of his novels have interesting premises), but cannot write worth a damn. Gerritsen weaves the two basic storylines into a strong novel that culminates in several shocking conclusions as she sutures up the loose ends nicely, giving us a glimpse into the darker side of the medical profession, its unsavory politics and its potential for moral and ethical collapse.