Warning: the dog dies. Actually, most of the dogs on the West Coast die here, victims either of a prion plague (think Mad Cow Disease) that turns them suddenly vicious in its last stages, or of systematic extermination. Worse yet, bitten humans turn out to be susceptible, too. Ehrenhaft, author of entries in the Bone Chillers series, places Logan, an Oregon teenager with family problems, and Jack, a wild dog he’s tamed who turns out to be immune to the plague, and therefore the key to a cure, against a backdrop of rising governmental and public panic. The two escape the plague, but not the panic: losing themselves in the woods despite the best efforts of Logan’s bad-news stepfather to keep them separately captive, the two fugitives are finally forced to place themselves in the care of Logan’s estranged father (a brilliant epidemiologist, forsooth) after Jack is brutally beaten by vigilante exterminators. Though happenstance plays a large role in the plot, and the author has a tendency to trot in typecast characters, then summarily drop them, disaster-tale fans with a taste for the lurid will not be let down by this melodramatic, if predictable, chiller. (Fiction. 11-13)
