The Mosquito War
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
They were so close to a cure. And no one cared. Why should they? Americans would not care about malaria until their own children woke screaming with the fever, until they started burying small caskets in their own country. Su Thom picked up the flask. It was only a tiny sample, but it wouldn't be hard to culture. The idea was so simple. So horrible. So perfect. Americans did not care about anything until it was a threat to their own people. Well then . . . that could be arranged.
The Mosquito War is a fast-paced thriller with crooked pharmaceutical companies, a CIA plot gone horribly awry, and a terrorist weapon that comes in a very small package. When combined, these elements produce a deadly force that one grief-stricken scientist is determined to unleash on the American people to make them pay for their indifference to the plight of Third World suffering.
Who will try to stop him? Conor Gale, a world-weary young man who has more pride than sense, and Zee Aspen, a beautiful scientist working on aquatic medical research that might hold the key to the whole puzzle. Thrown together, mistrustful, but believing that the devil you know somewhat is better than the hordes of unknown bad guys who are definitely out to get you, they will have to work fast or an epidemic, unparalleled in our history, will spread this nation . . . and millions will die.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A scuba diver and a gourmet caterer in her nonliterary life, MacAlister here crafts a debut thriller distinguished by its luminous underwater diving scenes and earnest focus on a Third World health crisis. As the book begins, pharmaceutical firm SeaGenesis has found a cure for malaria a serum derived from sea sponges looking like spinach, and therefore labeled "popeye" but the higherups cut funding for the project before the cure can be thoroughly tested. Frustrated Vietnamese lab assistant Su Thom, whose mother and brother died of malaria, decides to take matters into his own hands. How better to make Americans care about finding a cure than to toss two large jarfuls of mosquitoes bearing a fatal strain of malaria into a mall throng in Washington on July 4? Meanwhile, beautiful scuba-diving scientist Zee Aspen, who collects popeye for SeaGenesis, becomes suspicious when one too many accidents happen on the job. She joins forces with a rough-edged Robin Hood, Connor Gale, who works for a company providing private security for unscrupulous SeaGenesis and has also noticed that something fishy is going on. What is SeaGenesis's link to the CIA? And is Connor's adoptive father and boss hiding secrets of his own? Connor, the orphaned son of a smalltime thief and pickpocket, is a compelling character, and MacAlister crafts a convincing bioterrorist scenario. If her attempt to follow the lives of a selection of Americans bitten by malarial mosquitoes is a little forced, readers will forgive her once they make it to the novel's moving conclusion.