Night Harvest

A Novel

By: Michael Alexiades

Narrated by: Dennis Holland

Length: 8 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

A riveting debut thriller from one of New York's most eminent surgeons, Night Harvest follows the bizarre disappearance of patients from a Manhattan hospital into the murky underground of the city.

Fourth-year medical student Demetri Makropolis has been assigned to cover orthopedics at Eastside Medical Center, one of New York City's finest hospitals. Just as his surgery team begins to operate on New York's leading drama critic, F. J. Pervis III, the patient suddenly goes into cardiac arrest. The team fails to resuscitate him, so the corpse is moved to the hospital's morgue. But before the autopsy is even performed, the body vanishes from the morgue and mysteriously reappears a day later - with the brain surgically removed. Even more disturbing is the medical examiner's discovery: Pervis was still alive when the ghostly craniotomy was performed.

With their reputation at stake, the hospital assigns NYPD's Detective Patrick McManus to the case; meanwhile, Demetri learns of an eerily similar century-old unsolved mystery that leads him to an enigmatic figure lurking in the bowels of the medical center. With Pervis as his experiment, the perpetrator initiates a chain reaction of chaos and murder in Manhattan.

A gripping tale filled with ambition, romance, jealousies, and black humor, Night Harvest is a thrilling ride that culminates in the long-abandoned elaborate network of subterranean rooms and corridors that still lie beneath present-day Manhattan.

©2013 Michael Alexiades (P)2014 Audible Inc.

Just okay; not awful, not great

This is my first time with both Alexiades & Holland, so I tried to keep an open mind. My first reaction to the reader was that he was somewhat amateurish, either over- or under-doing emphasis & characterization, but I got used to him within the first hour or so & after that he didn't really improve or detract from the story.

As for the book itself....it's got some good points; some of the characters are fairly 3-D, with enough complexity & backstory to seem realistic. Luckily, the main character is one of those. I found the evil bad guy to be a bit flat....I never did really 'get into' him or grow to hate or like him. Why he did the horrible things he did (not going to go into it in detail lest I spoil things) wasn't terribly believable for me. I'm extremely flexible as far as suspending disbelief goes, and will ride along with all sorts of wild, supernatural/unnatural/extrasensory/alien stuff if the author provides any sort of quasi-realistic framework for it. This didn't really fly for me, though I'm not certain whether that was a fault in the book or because I had trouble keeping my attention focused...which could indicate a different type of problem with the book. I never did get a sense of how/where he lived, & again I'm not sure whether it was a lack in writing or just failure to keep my attention.

The way the book is structured --jumping between different characters-- occasionally was confusing until I managed to keep them all straight.

The worst part of the book was how many of the women & sexual relationships were presented. I'm the last person to be called a feminist & am tough to offend, but most of the females were portrayed as if written by a hormonally hopped-up 14-year-old boy. Must be something in the water in that hospital; the women are nearly all nymphomaniacs. It got tedious & ludicrous, like the author was practicing his submissions to Penthouse Forum.

Other than that ridiculousness, the book was an okay thriller/scary book. Sort of. I'd be happier if it'd been one of those 4.95 books, though.

very good entertainment

Who done it? I loved this book, It was creepy and funny and the characters were a ton of fun. Ok you kinda could figure it out, but I liked it anyway.

Too…..

I liked the medical aspects and suspense. Excessive profanity not so much. So, I skipped a large amount of chapters and satisfied my curiosity of “who-dun-it”. Skip this one. Read his next one.