THE CORPSE BLOOM | Kirkus Reviews

In Wiggins’ novel, a renowned doctor in legal and professional trouble takes a job that calls his notions of bioethics and inheritance into question.

Dr. Bradley Baker is a highly successful Boston surgeon specializing in kidney transplants. His team has developed a game-changing medical advancement—a drug they’re confident that will extend the usefulness of a cadaverous kidney for transplant so that it’s equivalent to one from a living donor. Life has consisted of one success after another for Dr. Baker, and when Sam Kirby, a friend from his past, comes back into his life in need of a gifted kidney surgeon, Brad is all too happy to perform the operation. These procedures are a breeze for Brad—and for the reader, too, as the operating-room scenes are tense and authentic, and informative without being dry: “Time, space, and even Brad’s sense of self disappeared when he was in sync with his work and team….” After Sam’s new kidney begins to “pink up,” Brad leaves the less-demanding post-op work to his junior colleagues. While he’s away from the hospital, Sam suddenly dies from a heart attack. Brad is despondent and his confidence is shaken. Then Sam’s wife, Faye Kirby, sues the hospital, and Brad’s career is thrown into jeopardy. When his boss insists Brad take some time off, the prospect of a year without any salary—while his daughter starts at an expensive university and his wife expects a healthy donation to her charitable work—makes him reconsider a mysterious job offer he’s just received during a conference in Mexico.

He’s been specially recruited to lead a team of surgeons working at a state-of-the-art transplant center deep in the heart of the Mexican jungle. It’s a mysterious proposition: The center’s inner workings are secretive, run by a well-dressed man with astoundingly deep pockets, and the accommodations—as well as the compensation—seem too good to be true. As the screws tighten on his professional life back home, Brad capitulates and takes the offer. The new job is exciting at first—readers get to luxuriate, along with the doctor, in his sleek new surroundings, and his custom greenhouse filled with exotic, rare flora—but it soon becomes clear just who Dr. Baker has mixed himself up with, and why the center’s workings have been kept hidden. From there, the narrative becomes even more compelling, and readers will enjoy finding out who does what to whom. Even before this point, though, the work has much to offer. Dr. Baker is a complicated figure, and the delicacy with which he navigates choppy waters both at his old hospital in Boston and his new posting in Mexico helps elevate the novel from run-of-the-mill thriller to something more thoughtful and, in the end, more satisfying. Some characters are types whom readers may recognize—the wealthy, golden-hearted mystery man whose wealth, it turns out, comes from shady dealings, or the no-nonsense cool-under-pressure nurse—but they are drawn so deftly as to feel real.

A taut, nuanced medical thriller.