What Dr. Cook is so good at is exploiting the nervousness that many of us feel when faced with needles and men in white coats and brushed-aluminum medical machinery....What's more, Dr. Cook effectively milks our latent paranoia concerning the selfishness of drug companies and the civic irresponsibility of big business. In fact, the story's prejudice here is so effortlessly evoked, it makes you wonder whether a benevolent picture of big business is even possible in fiction any more....I seemed to recall an earlier novel by Dr. Cook -was it ''Coma,'' ''Sphinx,'' or ''Brain,'' or all three of them? -where things don't turn out very well. (In praising Dr. Cook, I never said his fiction isn't forgettable.) But in any case, by the time ''Fever'' began to deteriorate into absolute absurdity, I was having far too good a time to be willing to notice. -- New York Times