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Product Description
Chuck Hogan's new thriller opens as Drs. Stephen Pearse and Peter Maryk are summoned deep into the rain forests of the Congo, where a deadly virus -- set free from a centuries-old uranium cave -- has decimated a mining camp. Desperate, they bomb the area, resealing the cave containing the incurable disease. But two years later, it reappears, devastating the small New England town of Plainville. In the next few years, other isolated incidents are also ruthlessly silenced by Maryk, now head of the Bureau for Disease Control's (BDC) Special Pathogens Section. He and Pearse, now director of the BDC, have become bitter enemies, divided by opposing scientific philosophies. Still, as the virus continues to elude any vaccine with a disturbingly human cunning the men seek not only to stop it but to figure out how it came from Africa. Their battle with "Plainville" intensifies as it becomes clear that the virus has acquired a face, having taken over a human host. And in particular, this toxic creature pursues one brave young woman whose blood, immune to the virus, is the serum of life in the face of a viral death. Pearse and Maryk keep her close and protected, while formulating a plan to get to the killer first.
Amazon.com Review
"Clean human blood was a precious commodity as the first decade of the twenty-first century drew to a close. An onslaught of viral and bacterial disease had depleted the reliable source pool, and patients around the world were dying, stuck on long lists waiting for transfusions of unpolluted blood. Lucrative black markets had sprung up in every major population center, from New York to Beijing to Cairo, where illicit blood traded at fifteen to twenty times its weight in gold. Like many medical scientists of the day, Peter and I had dedicated ourselves to the great challenge of developing a safe, synthetic, human blood substitute..."
That's the gripping premise of Chuck Hogan's The Blood Artists. Doctors Stephen Pearse and Peter Maryk, working for the Bureau of Disease Control (the much tougher, FBI-like successor to the Center for Disease Control), track a killer virus out of Africa that makes Ebola look like a slight case of indigestion. This nasty bug seems to have both intelligence and an agenda, and when it acquires a human host it might just be too much for the world to handle. As he did in his first thriller, The Standoff, Hogan humanizes complicated concepts and creates characters with lots of energy.
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