Cook's new thriller questions medical tourism to India

India's fledgling medical outsourcing industry could soon be taking a body blow from an upcoming medical mystery thriller by Robin Cook, the acknowledged maestro of the genre, which is set partly in New Delhi.

Foreign Body , Cook's new offering on the lines of his earlier hits such as Coma and Outbreak will hit small screen and book stores later this summer, but in a unique first, former Disney mogul Michael Eisner's media company Vuguru is releasing teaser web episodes to promote the book and the serial that claim to that look into the "dark side of medical tourism in India."

The story begins with the death of an American woman during a routine surgery in India. Her granddaughter Jennifer Hernandes, a fourth-year medical student, flies to New Delhi to take charge.

What follows are thrills, chills and spills which may make great reading and TV viewing, but could sock it to India's medical tourism industry that's growing at the rate of knots. There is some indication though that the story may be even-handed even as it looks at the "Indian nonsense," as one of the characters puts it. The health industry in the US tries to stem the tide of patients going abroad by scaremongering about the procedures in India.

In a teaser clip released this week, the first of a 50-part series produced by Eisner's media company Vuguru and web producer Big Fantastic, an attractive Indian nurse is seen injecting a patient with lethal injection before the scene cuts to Southern California where she dolefully watchers her laughing colleagues skinny-dipping on a beach.

A release that accompanied the teasers cranks out the following pitch: A group of dangerous Indian beauties, brimming with hope and desire are brought to the sunny shores of Southern California and are promised the American dream. They are taken in by a group of young, cutthroat medical entrepreneurs who hope to train them and cultivate their nursing skills for their own mysterious ends. The women soon become seduced by the brash and ambitious charmer who lords over them, but for him, his lust for the one, mysterious, unattainable beauty threatens to unravel the very conspiracy he built.