Review: Fast-paced medical thriller worthy of Michael Crichton
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 8, 2012
Highly readable book, attractive characters, inventive, and hard-to-put-down, this is one of the best thrillers I've read in a long time. And the science behind it seems plausible as far as I can tell. A veterinarian in Montana notices an increase in diseased cattle. She meets up with a statistician from the Centers for Disease Control who flew up to investigate a spike in his reports. The problem turns out to be a cross-species prion disease, similar to Mad Cow Disease, but much faster acting. From there things get worse as every page brings a new disaster. The cute romantic involvement between the vet and the statistician is about the only relief from the impending global apocalypse.The book raises interesting questions about our civilization. Have we become so specialized that, like the saber-toothed tiger, we are doomed as a species? Would a plague, just a little more communicable than AIDS, spread inevitably around the world and bring an end to humanity? The book ends with some hope but the question is sobering.