The Third Pandemic - Hardcover

A plague novel, chockablock with microbiological weirdness and humans who behave at times with about as much conscience as microbes: a story as absorbingly ambitious as Ouellette's debut fiction (The Deus Machine, 1994). Uni, a worldwide conglomerate of companies, is largely a relay system of computers, a global megabeast. Its main cytoputer, based in part on human cytoplasm (a far more reliable conductor of electrons than the finest wire), is more powerful than any other computer system on the planet. At Uni's Virtual Surgery Center, Dr. Elaine Wilkes discovers that Agent 57a, a theoretical bacillus she has extrapolated from molecular descriptions of Chlamydia psittaci, has a very good chance of coming into being within the next ten years and halving the world population--though the cytoputer's gigantic capabilities might devise an antidote within the next two years. Uni decides to keep the upcoming outbreak a secret, stockpile vast reserves of the antidote, and make a superfortune when the bug hits. Little does Uni know that the plague, incubated in and carried by parrots, pigeons, and other birds, is already afoot in Third World countries and spreading swiftly. Elaine, dismayed, steals the cytoputer's plague disks and plans to get copies to world health organizations. Uni, however, sends its bad guys after her, and she's arrested in Seattle. There, she falls in with Lt. Philip Paris, a detective obsessed with finding a nutcase who has been spreading E. coli in Seattle restaurants and has put Paris's wife into a permanent coma. Paris springs Elaine and hides her on his boat in Puget Sound. While pursuits and showdowns hold the reader in a vise grip, as do descriptions of American cities in bacterial meltdown, the novel's most awesome power comes from Ouellette's smiling descriptions of colonies of Chlamydis psittaci on the move, pages potent enough to shock any reader into a severe health regimen. Very scary, a fabulously grisly amusement not to be read in bed. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

A nonhuman life form run amok energizes Ouellette's compulsively readable second thriller just as it did his first, The Deus Machine. Only here the threat is viral, not virtual. Scientist Elaine Wilkes of the Webster Foundation has used a computer simulation to predict that, within 10 years, a mutated form of the common Chlamydia psittaci virus will decimate the world's human population. The money people behind Elaine's research want to use this information to create a vaccine they can market after a few million people die. But, in the first of the novel's many coincidences, the mutated virus already exists. As Elaine enlists the aid of Seattle detective Philip Paris and public-health official David Muldane, the virus is poised to sweep from Africa to the rest of the world. The images Ouellette uses to describe viruses?tribes, explorers, colonists, merchants?are vivid and effective, and he lays out the complicated chain of events that created the killer disease clearly and succinctly. He stretches credulity, however, by making one of the links in that chain not only a Webster Foundation employee but one of Elaine's co-workers. Such contrivances mar a thriller that is otherwise excellent. Ouellette does an outstanding job of creating a world in which the potential outbreak of disease terrifies nearly everyone, from a twisted serial killer whose weapon of choice is E. Coli bacteria to a jailed gangster concerned about TB. Before they finish this gripping tale, readers, too, will have become compulsive hand-washers. Author tour.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.