Focuses on a disappointingly small part of the epidemic, but digging into the virus’s genesis and design makes for a...
In the authors’ debut thriller, scientists worldwide are baffled when an apparent epidemic featuring strokelike symptoms can’t be traced to a virus or germ.
Studying humans’ longevity, CDC statistician Katie McMannloses is understandably upset when a couple of the women she’s been monitoring die. But the women were over 100 years old. What really gets Katie concerned is the unusually high rate of deaths among people 90 and over. The deaths seem to be the result of strokes, but in just a couple of days, the number of deaths in the U.S. hits a staggering 80,000. While scientists can’t find a virus or bacteria, Katie’s blood tests from the fatalities pinpoint six key markers. Katie surmises that what the CDC calls SDX, or “symptomatic disease unknown,” is somehow accelerating the aging process for internal organs, but she’s faced with another obstacle when she tests herself and learns she’s infected. So, too, are most others—except one negative: Katie and her husband Rob’s daughter, Hope. To find a cure, Katie desperately needs to locate another negative candidate before the world’s population is wiped out completely. Despite the global epidemic, the story is surprisingly small-scale, focusing mostly on Katie, her family and others at the CDC. This highlights the scientific approach and generates suspense as Katie tries to determine SDX’s origin and runs test after test in search of another person like Hope. The seemingly endless tests also slow down the plot considerably, and dialogue is filled with guesswork, theories or briefings—for people like the president—that often detail test results readers already know. Scenes with Katie at home with Rob and their three children help relieve the tension of the lab, while virus expert Dr. Ben Shah’s trip to Russia (SDX’s probable starting point) both expands the story beyond the U.S. and develops a supporting character; in fact, Ben’s former lover and daughter are over there. More traditional aspects of the thriller genre crop up late in the story, but they’re Katie-centric, including someone possibly following her and a potential threat on her life. The novel fares best when it sticks to the intercontinental ramifications, particularly in its powerful, dauntless coda.
Focuses on a disappointingly small part of the epidemic, but digging into the virus’s genesis and design makes for a riveting story.Pub Date: July 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990485414
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Rhino Air
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
