Heartbeat was a relatively good book for me, although I didn't think it was exceptional. No matter how much I tried, I couldn't connect emotionally. For a book such as this, not connecting emotionally feels like a downfall because the whole concept of it is actually very heartbreaking. Instead, I felt rather detached. Maybe because the protagonist, Emma, was such a detestable character. The subject matter and plot however were original, which is why my interest in the book itself didn't waver all too much.

 

Emma was so self-absorbed and so filled with self-pity, I felt a strong urge to shake her for at least half of the book. But I did understand her to some degree. Through an inexplicable feat, she managed to make sense as the world's most spoilt brat on earth. I could see why she was so upset but she was so self-involveded, I found it difficult to care much about her.

 

Still, the issue about life and death definitely got me thinking. While I disagreed completely with Emma's assessment of the whole situation, seeing her brain-dead mother couldn't have been easy in any sense of the word. It's natural that she was overcome with such an exceeding grief. Yet taking her mother off life support wouldn't have been any easier a decision. That's the core of Heartbeat that made me read on—the moral dilemma of sustaining a life.

 

Moral ambiguity is always difficult to grapple with, especially when it causes such great emotional distress for everyone involved. Weighing the costs of particular choices can't be measure in absolute terms, so the explorations of life and death, love and hate, were extremely difficult in this novel. It's stories like these that make me appreciate fiction more because it allows us to think about our own lives and reflect on who we are and what we believe in.

 

This review is also available on dudettereads.com.

I just happened to have a copy of this book, I don't really recall how I got it/when I bought it...

 

A group of old men gets a strange disease and no one knows how they got this disease. It happens to be that all of them entered in a project with life prolonging hormones. It seems like there is something wrong with the experiment?

The writing is similar to her other books, but somehow I thought this book to be more readable. At least I read this book much faster than I read Harvest and I actually thought that this story was more interesting. The creepiness of a disease like Creutzfeldt-Jacob is enough to terrify me. But that, of course, is a matter of opinion. As I said, I'm planning to read more of her books soon.

 

Note: I read a Dutch translation of this book

Fantastic book, chilling and exciting all at the same time. Well written and with strong characters. loved it.

This was horrible for me. I understand that this was a stand alone and was quite different from the Rizzoli & Isles series, but this was by far the worst I've read by her.If I would have read this first and not the other series, I would have never picked any of her books up!I hated the plot, the story itself, the characters were flat and dull, the ending was horrible, and just everything altogether for me was total yuck!Prostitutes, non human babies/tumors thingies, ER night shift, everyone blaming someone else for others' mistakes, Newton Mass. (stolen or I guess inspired R&I series), burying people alive, prolonging life. This all had a good premesis and then when it comes down to actually reading it, I was dreading it!I should have just put it down and it should've just stayed down.Oh well, wasn't my cup of tea.