Even if virus thrillers are dime-a-dozen, one has to hand it to Jeff Carlson for finding a unique angle for his debut novel PLAGUE YEAR: His medical malfeasant is a lab-created nanotech designed to kill cancer, but instead kills people when it’s unleashed on an unsuspecting public. But it can only survive at altitudes under roughly 10,000 feet, so those few survivors at ground zero – California – who managed to make it up the mountains to safety don’t have their flesh eaten by these microscopic monsters.
The flipside: There’s only so much vegetation and animal life up there for them to consume before they have to start eating each other.
Hey, it happens.
Salvation exists high above the earth on the International Space Station, where idealist nanotech researcher Dr. Ruth Goldman orbits, devising methods to conquer the plague before it conquers mankind. When she decides she only can be of true help if she’s in the thick of it, her crew isn’t too amused, but makes an unscheduled and highly risky landing in Colorado.
That, obviously, is where the two threads merge. Think of it like the Donner party forming a book club, and their inaugural selection was Michael Crichton’s PREY. But whereas Crichton blends the storytelling and the science, Carlson tends to separate them. Thus, the thriller stops thrilling for several chapters of stats and lab lingo, and the narrative stumbles.
Keep in mind, it’s Carlson’s first, so he only can grow from here. And while I ultimately tired of PLAGUE YEAR’s redundancy in the middle, it still left me with enough goodwill that I look forward to see what he comes up with next. –Rod Lott
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Keep seeing this one on the rack….haven’t gotten to it yet. May wait now.
Give it a try. Despite my reservations about the middle, I’d still consider it a positive read. Plus, Jeff is a nice guy — he deserves another sale!
It did lose a bit in the midle, but I really got into the nuts and bolts of postapocalypse survival–the governmental stuff and just the portrait Carlson paints of a devastated America. A lot of books don’t explore the everyday side of doomsday, and I liked it.
As a side note, this book was the subject to an apparent bidding war by publishers, which Lou Anders of Pyr wrote about on his blog
his blog. interesting stuff!