The Lake House

The Lake House\ \ By James Patterson \ Warner Books\ Copyright © 2003 James Patterson\ All right reserved.\ ISBN: 0-446-61514-5 \ \ \ Prologue\ RESURRECTION \ The Hospital, somewhere in Maryland\ At about eleven in the evening, Dr. Ethan Kane trudged down the gray-and-blue-painted corridor toward a private elevator. His mind was filled with images of death and suffering, but also progress, great progress that would change the world.\ A young and quite homely scrub nurse rounded the corner of the passageway and nodded her head deferentially as she approached him. She had a crush on Dr. Kane, and she wasn't the only one.\ "Doctor," she said, "you're still working."\ "Esther, you go home, now. Please," Ethan Kane said, pretending to be solicitous and caring, which couldn't have been further from the truth. He considered the nurse inferior in every way, including the fact that she was female.\ He was also exhausted from a surgical marathon: five major operations in a day. The elevator car finally arrived, the doors slid open, and he stepped inside.\ "Good night, Esther," he said, and showed the nurse a lot of very white teeth, but no genuine warmth, because there was none to show.\ He straightened his tall body and wearily passed his hand over his longish blond hair, cleaned his wire-rimmed glasses on the tail of his lab coat, then rubbed his eyes before putting his glasses back on as hedescended to the subbasement level.\ One more thing to check on ... always one more thing to do.\ He walked half a dozen quick steps to a thick steel door and pushed it open with the palm of his hand.\ He entered the dark and chilly atmosphere of a basement storage room. A pungent odor struck him.\ There, lying on a double row of gurneys, were six naked bodies. Four men, two women, all in their late teens and early twenties. Each was brain-dead, each as good as gone, but each had served a worthy cause, a higher purpose. The plastic bracelets on their wrists said DONOR.\ "You're making the world a better place," Kane whispered as he passed the bodies. "Take comfort in that."\ Dr. Kane strode to the far end of the room and pushed open another steel door, an exact duplicate of the first. This time rather than a chilly blast, he was met by a searing wave of hot air, the deafening roar of fire, and the unmistakable smell of death.\ All three incinerators were going tonight. Two of his nighttime porters, their powerful workingman bodies glistening with grime and sweat, looked up as Dr. Kane entered the cinder-block chamber. The men nodded respectfully, but their eyes showed fear.\ "Let's pick up the pace, gentlemen. This is taking too long," Kane called out. "Let's go, let's go! You're being paid well for this scut work. Too well."\ He glanced at a naked young woman's corpse laid out on the cement floor. She was white-blond, pretty in a music-video sort of way. The porters had probably been diddling with her. That's why they were behind schedule, wasn't it?\ Gurneys were shoved haphazardly into one corner, like discarded shopping carts in a supermarket parking lot. Quite a spectacle. Hellish, to be sure.\ As he watched, one of the sweat-glazed minions worked a wooden paddle under a young male's body while the other swung open the heavy glass door of an oven. Together they pushed, shoved, slid the body into the fire as if it were a pizza.\ The flames dampened for a moment, then as the porters locked down the door, the inferno flared again. The cremation chamber was called a "retort." Each retort burned at 3,600 degrees, and it took just over fifteen minutes to reduce a human body to nothing but ashes.\ To Dr. Ethan Kane, that meant one thing: no evidence of what was happening at the Hospital. Absolutely no evidence of Resurrection.\ "Pick up the pace!" he yelled again. "Burn these bodies!"\ The donors.\ (Continues...)\ \ \ \ \ Excerpted from The Lake House by James Patterson Copyright © 2003 by James Patterson. Excerpted by permission.\ All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.\ Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site. \ \

\ Publishers WeeklyWhen the Wind Blows (1998), to which this is a sequel, has been Patterson's "most successful novel around the world," according to an author's note. That novel, about children genetically engineered to fly, also thrilled most critics. This one won't, despite some charms, and the reason manifests itself in the three paragraphs-paragraphs, mind-that begin chapter 41: "They were elated to be together again-the flock! The tribe! The family!" Patterson tends toward shorthand writing, and generally it works in his favor, but the problem here is that exclamation points do not engender deep emotions within readers! Nor do italics. And the novel is strewn with both, as well as with too much dumbed-down prose. The plot isn't much to boast about, either. In the original, Max the flying bird-girl and her "siblings" were menaced by the mad scientists who ran the vile laboratory known as "the School," but were helped in escaping by erstwhile narrator Frannie O'Neill, a veterinarian, and Kit Brennan, an FBI agent. Here, Max and her five siblings are menaced by the mad scientist who runs the vile laboratory known as "the Hospital" but are helped by erstwhile narrator Frannie and Kit. So what's new? Not much, other than a few neat touches (for instance, the villain, Dr. Ethan Kane, is addicted to M&Ms) and-in by far the best section of the novel, not coincidentally one in which Patterson slows down-a truly moving description of how Max and the oldest male bird-child mate. The rest is an extended hunt and chase, as Kane goes after Max and her siblings in a medical conspiracy so outrageously unbelievable that readers will blink in wonder. The pages move like the wind that lifts Max's wings, of course, but Patterson can, and has, done far better than this. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ \ \ Library JournalFrannie and Kit-a veterinarian and an FBI agent, respectively-rescue six very unusual children from an illegal genetic engineering facility called "The School." Although the kids all have biological parents, Frannie and Kit seek to be named their legal guardians. They know the children need to be protected from further harm, while learning to live with their unusual physical condition: all six have wings and can fly. Only Maxie, the oldest child, knows that there is another lab, called "The Hospital." There, Dr. Ethan Kane is harvesting organs of unwitting donors to create a master race who will dominate the world. When the doctor comes looking for the children, Frannie and Kit and the kids "take flight." Patterson (The Jester) leaves something to be desired in this novel: the characters are flat and the dialog banal. The outcome is predictable, and loose ends abound. Though well read by Hope Davis and Stephen Lang, this program is not recommended.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.\ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsThis sequel to Patterson’s bestselling, and best, novel (When the Wind Blows, 1998) soars, like its appealing cast, only intermittently. Having been rescued from the genetics lab, the six young clones, half-bird, half-person, are ready for an even rougher battle with a justice system that pits their rescuers--FBI cowboy Thomas Brennan, a.k.a. Kit Harrison, and his lover, veterinary Frannie O’Neill--against the heartbroken natural parents who’d been told they were dead. Since Frannie and Kit have no legal standing in re the children and have known each other only a short time, they’re returned to their four families in Colorado suburbs. While Max, the flock’s leader, stands up to the bullies who taunt her brother Matthew and then gives a ride to a hunky fellow teenager who wants to cop a feel, villainous Dr. Ethan Kane, who hates pets, keeps a Stepford wife at his beck and call, and murders scores of innocent "donors" in pursuit of a visionary nightmare called the Resurrection Project, is closing in on these sitting ducks. Exactly how his prey--Max and Matthew, older teenagers Ozymandias and Icarus, and four-year-old twins Peter and Wendy--fit into Kane’s nefarious, grandiose schemes is no more clear than why anybody hasn’t made inquiries about the hundreds of earlier victims he’s lured into his den at the Hauer Institute. But there’s no doubt that sooner or later the evil Kane will have his quarry caged, now in the company of the beloved protectors on whom they’ve imprinted for life, and will be crowing over them as he contemplates his plans for what amounts to world domination. Patterson’s sensibility dovetails perfectly with that of his prodigies, whose tender feelings and pitch-perfectteenage dialogue are the best things here. It’s only when human grownups have to talk and act that this overblown saga sags.\ \