Robin Cook

Robin Cook, a medical doctor, is a founding father of the "medical thriller" genre of popular fiction. His 1977 novel Coma was a sensation (and was turned into a film directed by another author/M.D., Michael Crichton). Cook gave up practicing medicine and ended up writing dozens of novels, many of them bestsellers. As with Coma, many of Cook's novels have been adapted for the screen, including Sphinx (1979), Harmful Intent (1990), Terminal (1993) and Invasion (1997). Cook has also authored the Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery series of medical thrillers (at least a dozen books since 1992). Cook's many other novels have included Outbreak (1987), Vital Signs (1991), Toxin (1998), Seizure (2003), Cell (2014) and Pandemic (2018). Cook's 1999 novel Vector, the fictional tale of bioterrorists spreading anthrax in New York City, foreshadowed the real-life 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S.