Richard Preston leads us to believe or hope that a similar group is, in reality, maintaining alert status under a classified Federal charter. The novel very convincingly asserts that some variant of its story is inevitable. The story opens with a death. Alice Austin, a naive, young Public Health Service physician, answers the call to investigate. Her forensic database expands as more victims are found.
Bizarre deaths proliferate to become a potential national disaster.
While simultaneously pursuing the perpetrator and side-stepping the bureaucracy, the clever heroine steadfastly seeks diagnoses of the victims' illnesses rather than police investigator's solutions. Dr. Austin focuses her forensic investigation on medical science, albeit with a small dash of intuition. Its language is graphically descriptive in a terse construction that slowly amasses information and builds to a chilling climax. This is not a book for the fainthearted. If dissecting frogs in biology class was traumatic, do not read this book.