Author: Kathy T Kale
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Rating: WORTHY!
I love this kind of story, especially when it's well written, as this one is, with great world-building and memorable, flawed characters. I really liked the main character, Dana Sparks. Great name, great character, strong and weak, smart and dumb, proactive and paralyzed, attractive and repulsive just like a real person. She was just the ticket to entertainment. I also love stories about disease outbreaks. I find them more horrifying than actual horror stories because even as you chill at horror stories you know they're ridiculous. Viral and bacterial pandemics are real. The last outbreak of pneumonic plague in the US was this year in Texas. This novel is set in Texas!
Dana Sparks is a plague expert who is desperately seeking a grant to research a new vaccine. She works for a university, but she doesn't have tenure. She was on track for it when her old boss left and a new military man was brought in. Since then, her life has been plagued. McCoy doesn’t like her, and it now looks like her tenure quest is questionable. Dana is her own worst enemy. She sees rules and regulations as optional, which only antagonizes McCoy who is of course (being a military man brought out of retirement to take over as head of the research facility), a stickler for regulation.
Her vaccine is ready for human trials which the army will shortly conduct, but there is some question as to what its side-effects might be. Losing patience, Dana once again goes off the reservation and tries it out on herself. She has no bad reaction to it, fortunately. Curiously, it’s right around this time that an outbreak of bubonic plague starts up in the very town where she lives and works. Her life is further complicated when she learns that Nick, her thesis adviser, and a married man with whom she had a highly inappropriate affair, is coming back to town for the first time in seven years to lend his expertise to combating the outbreak.
As she, Nick, and a guy from the CDC who has the hots for Dana, try to pin down how it began so they can figure out how to fight it, and they conduct one investigation after another into people and wildlife, they slowly begin to realize that this is not your typical outbreak. They can find neither patient zero nor ground zero, and as the victims start to mount, and the plague goes from the relatively quiescent bubonic form to the virulent, much more deadly, and highly transmissible pneumonic form; then Nick gets the septicemic form - the deadliest of all.
When Dana's lab assistant's young daughter contracts the disease, Dana - at the passionate demand of the girl's mother - administers the vaccine to her and to her mom, and also to a high school jock who has it. They all recover. McCoy, whose heart isn't anywhere near as strong as his will, fights against requests that they publicize this outbreak. He fears panic and also the cancellation of the vice-president's planned visit to town. As things continue to slide south, even he finally realizes that a public announcement is necessary. On the morning of the announcement, he learns of Dana's renegade delivery of the vaccine to certain victims, and the stress is too much. He keels over with a heart attack and is hurried to the hospital.
The idiotic mayor makes the announcement, but he claims the disease is a virulent form of flu - and then tells everyone that prophylactic antibiotics are available. It’s plain to anyone who who has a modicum of medical knowledge that there's a huge disconnect here: influenza is a viral disease, whereas the bubonic plague is a bacterial disease. Antibiotics are useless against viruses!
It’s at this point that we (but not Dana) learn that there is an FBI agent in town - and he believes that the plague was started by Dana herself, to promote her vaccine and to win for her this research grant and her tenure!
I loved this novel. It was action-packed, fast moving, and intelligently written by someone who knows what she's talking about, but who doesn't make the Tom Clancy-ish mistake of permitting reams of technical detail to trip up a good story. I made the wrong choice as to who was behind this plague outbreak! In my defense, I'm usually slow at this anyway, and there's a distracting red herring swimming around, too.
I really think this novel could have used a much better title, but that's really the only fault I found with it. It's really well-written, it’s engrossing, it moves quickly, it made me want to keep reading, it has a great female main character. You can't ask for more in a book!
