Review: Timely, Explosive!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 22, 2014
Alex Destephano is a registered nurse and a lawyer who has a great job in a New Orleans Medical Center called CCMC—Crescent City Medical Center. It happens that the Chief Administator and the Head of Nursing are on vacation, leaving Alex and her ex-husband in charge, just as the novel starts out with a crisis in the ER or ED,--Emergency Department—where a victim has suddenly gone CODE BLUE. Clearly, Author Rocchiccoli knows what she is writing about, because the realism is too good to be faked. Within a few hours more victims arrive taxing the ED and the hospital to its limits. They must call in the CDC from Atlanta to assist in identifying a mysterious virus causing multiple victims and quick deaths. We suspect this is a bioterrorist attack by an extremist cell, hiding in “The Big Easy,” one of whose members has infiltrated the NOPD and another is a trusted grad student at Tulane’s scientific bioresearch center. But, even the cell members are not sure who caused the virus attack, as they mistrust each other, and suspect it is a double-cross by a Russian terrorist from Chechnia. All the branches of law enforcement converge on the city in advance of a conference including the President and 100 or so top politicos. Thus the NOPD, FBI, Secret Service, State Police, National Guard, the Mayor, and the Governor’s office are all a part of the security preparations. Meantime there is a gruesome murder of a promising politician, a friend of Alex’s family, which appears to be a serial murder. The plot spins on with Alex and her associates driven to near exhaustion as more sick are admitted and more bodies pile up. The author does a superb job of handling the technical and scientific aspects of the story, and of building the suspense to a crashing finish.This novel is timely, discussing the very real threat of hidden terrorist cells, bent on killing ‘infidels’ and what they might do. Also, it discusses some of the highly technical ways that law enforcement has of scanning crowds and identifying threats.Highly recommended action/suspense/thriller.Dorothy May Mercer