Kirkus Reviews QR Code
WELLSPRING by Edward Hawkins

WELLSPRING

By

Pub Date: Oct. 29th, 1978
Publisher: McGraw-Hill

What a heartless idea, bringing biological warfare to Rocky Mountain spring water, the purest drink in the States and the pride of Colorado! But the Rockies around Colorado Springs are the watershed for the western U.S., and a psychopath has introduced Agua del Diablo, a Cuban sugar bacteria, into those pure streams. He plans to wipe out half the U.S. population. Deer start dropping dead in great numbers, their stomachs twisted into knots; then cows; and even humans are having fantastic headaches. Not only that, everybody's aluminumware is turning black. Then horror strikes hard as a company of 200 soldiers on field maneuvers in the hills is wiped out to a man. Paul Shade, Chief Control Chemist for Western Chemical, is leading the search for the source of the poison and for an antidote. When the psychopath is found and confesses, the search team finds that its problems have only begun, especially when the guilty man eats a poison shirt-button and dies ""the sweet death."" He has set several barrels of concentrated bacteria into special hiding places in the hills and attached time-bombs to them. Will search teams find them in time to avoid a massive population evacuation of 50 million people? Will Coors ever taste the same? Will the Western States become a field of corpses? Scary if you want it to be, but thin and drippy.