That's about all that we'll ever get to know about Alice, except that she is one heck of an epidemiologist. Yes, Alice has the disease-sleuthing magic. She will join up with other Federal researchers as they identify one victim after another and diagnose the killer disease. But readers planning on light airplane reading had better buckle up for pedantic weather. The story of the Government's frantic high-tech effort to beat the virus is interwoven with passages and chapters of explanatory exposition on the history, science and politics of germ warfare.
Experts are reluctant to talk too freely. . . .
The public simply must be told . . . Preston's real- world agenda apparently even requires ''The Cobra Event'' to have a glossary. Yes, one should not judge a book by its glossary. It's as if Preston were worried that the reader will miss the deeply researched message of the book, instead simply succumbing to the wish to read a swift-paced intrigue. Sermons, he has forgotten, are for Sundays.