Just Finished Reading Pandemic by Robin Cook

In probably not one of my better judgment moments I recently decided to read medical thriller writer Robin Cook's 2018 novel Pandemic...I've never read any of his books before but did see the movie Coma, based on his second published novel.  Pandemic continues his series of the husband/wife medical investigation team of Jack Stapleton and Laurie Montgomery, complete with all the subplots and conflicts involved with their ongoing personal lives...I could have done without a lot of that drama.  Jack is a New York City medical examiner who often flouts the rules and rubs people the wrong way as he bulldozes through his cases.  He's also very touchy as he picks up on and magnifies every slight...real or imagined...he receives from others: not a very sympathetic character I'd want to read more stories about.  But there are some eerie connections between the story's retrovirus causing a mysterious subway death in NYC and the COVID-19 outbreak: a New Jersey-based laboratory owned by a wealthy Chinese entrepreneur is using a special kind of protein to manufacture human tissue that the bodies of transplant patients won't reject...but something goes terribly wrong there.  It sounds to me a lot like what some believe happened in the Wuhan, China laboratory where viruses from bats and other animals were being isolated and studied.  Also, it's revealed that New York had been preparing for pandemics, anticipating a scenario where as many as 500 disease-caused deaths per day would be occurring there during the peak: an underestimate of what really happened two years later with the coronavirus.  Cook is very detailed about describing medical procedures and the science behind genetic engineering, especially...this to me is his strong point as a writer and understandable, he being a physician himself.  But without giving away the book's ending, I am beside myself with perplexity at how the author treated various characters: it seemed he was excusing if not praising the motives and actions of the villains while condemning their targeted victim for whom, although he did bear a certain degree of culpability, I felt a lot of sympathy and respect.  Maybe this wasn't the best Robin Cook novel out there, but I was so bummed out by the protagonist's behavior and the ending that it will probably be a while before I pick up another one...