Review: Intelligent near-future mystery/thriller
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 2, 2012
With the skull of a saber tooth tiger on the cover, it's not giving anything away to say that Sector C is ground zero for a genetic experiment that creates a chilling crisis on track to become a world-wide catastrophe.This mystery focuses on two central characters: Mike Schafer, a statistical analyst for the CDC who's working to diagnose a rapidly-spreading, unidentified human malady, and Donna Bailey, a McKenzie County vet who's baffled by a perplexing new disease that's killing farm animals and pets. Other characters are mainly farmers and greedy, amoral corporate villains.Mike and Donna team up to look for a transmissible pathogen -- "one that can jump species at will" -- one that might not even be limited to mammals. How they go about it is logical, believable and devastating. You'll probably learn as much as you've ever wanted to know about the human cost of pandemics and the tragic but necessary tactics used in an attempt to stop them.There are a few minor flaws in this novel but I didn't find any that ruined it for me. I thought the things that counted were in place. For one thing, I often like conflicted characters, but this time, in this book, it seemed right to have protagonists who aren't confused about what's right and what's wrong.Another thing that seemed right is the ending. As you might guess, it isn't wrapped up with a bow -- and that might bother some readers -- but this thing that's been unleashed will have repercussions into the future that the characters, rightly, can't even guess at.