VECTOR

A Classically Bad thriller from Swigart (The Book of Revelations; A.K.A.: A Cosmic Fable, etc.) in which a microbiologist discovers that a crazed colleague has a plan to destroy all of Slavic Russia. Charles Koenig is a California microbiologist working as a Fellow at the prestigious Douglass Research Center in Hawaii. One day Lieutenant Cobb Takamura of the Hawaiian Police Force comes to him for help: it seems there have been several murders lately, with the victims killed by an unidentified virus or ""bug."" Koenig is taken with Cobb and the two become fast friends--in spite, or because, of the fact that Takamura constantly quotes Charlie Chan: ""Every bird seeks its own tree--never tree the bird,"" he's fond of opining. Koenig calls in his own bird in the form of Patria, his beautiful anthropologist wife who's been away in the Yucatan. With her help, a nefarious plot is discovered: Koenig's superior at the Center, Dr. Ben Silver, has gone a little bit around the bend and has developed a virus that will kill only people who have Slavic blood, even a minute amount. Highly placed friends in the Armed Forces are in on this; Silver plans to release the virus in Russia in six months (the people murdered were test victims, Hawaiians with Russian blood). Fortunately, Koenig and Takamura save the day at the last minute, and a disgraced Silver commits suicide. Vector seems to have it all: bad prose (""Silence fell like a guillotine blade"") and dreadful sex scenes ("". . .they swept spiraling around the final bend and flew over the falls in a desperate roar of white noise and interstellar static. . . Then someone cut the knot, and they were two people lying in a bed""). At the close, Takamura quotes Chart: ""End of journey bring sadness."" Not always.