Amazon.com Review
One might wonder what thriller authors occupied themselves with before the onslaught of biotechnology: gene splicing, smart viruses, cloning techniques, and PCR-polymerase chain reactions are the current darlings of a host of writers, including Gary Braver (
Elixir), Richard Preston (
The Hot Zone), and Holden Scott (
Skeptic). In Scott's second novel,
The Carrier, Jack Collier, a Harvard Ph.D. candidate, has found a cure for cancer by engineering
Streptococcus A bacteria--known to tabloid newspaper fans everywhere as flesh-eating bacteria--to recognize and attack tumors rather than healthy flesh. It's a personal victory as well as a scientific breakthrough: haunted for months by the knowledge that his girlfriend, Angie, is dying of ovarian cancer, Jack has labored endless hours in the hopes of saving her.
But altruism is a rare bird in academic circles, and Michael Dutton, Jack's adviser, steals his idea, sets him up to be expelled, and nearly destroys the young man. Desperate to reach Angie, Jack breaks into his own lab, stows his petri dishes in his backpack, and takes off on a cross-country race against time. He doesn't know that something has gone terribly wrong with the cure, and that he is leaving a trail of death behind him. With two FBI agents--one a sympathetic scientist (who, perhaps too neatly, is a breast-cancer survivor) and one a militant psychopath (intent not just on finding Jack, but on killing him)--in hot pursuit, Jack's journey is one of narrow escapes and personal redemption.
Scott spins a mean story; though his characters and prose are occasionally stiff, there's no denying his ability to make us keep turning pages. The keen irony of Jack's predicament--technology has made him both a savior and a killer--is well crafted, and Scott refrains from belaboring the point. One might wish for a bit more "science" in this biotech thriller; the moments when Jack is in the lab are by far the most interesting, but they don't come often enough. With luck, the author's next scientific foray will rely more on the nitty-gritty, the test tubes and the electron microscopes. --Kelly Flynn
From Publishers Weekly
In a medical thriller that's a fast-moving but far-fetched follow-up to his debut Skeptic, Scott throws caution to the wind. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Jake Collier is expelled from school for plagiarism. Collier has been framed, however--by his acclaimed but corrupt mentor, Michael Dutton, who has plotted against his prot?g? to steal his breakthrough cure for cancer, which involves training flesh-eating bacteria to attack tumors rather than healthy flesh. Collier steals back the cure, and goes in search of his lost love, Angie, who is dying of ovarian cancer and whom he hopes to save. But something goes terribly wrong with the miracle cure, turning Collier unwittingly into the carrier of a deadly mutant strain that decimates a human body within seconds of physical contact with the carrier. After he leaves a trail of bodies in New York's Penn Station, the FBI becomes involved, but Collier evades both thuggish agent Vincent Moon, who has orders to kill him on sight, and Bureau scientist Tyler Ross, who isn't so quick to perceive the carrier as a monster. During a cross-country chase, Collier realizes why his body has turned deadly; with Ross on his side, he must escape the blood lust of Moon if he is going to transform from murderous to miraculous. The novel exhibits a hell-bent momentum that makes for quick reading, but inconsistencies hamper its flow. Characters are hobbled by cliched dialogue and colorless personalities, and the final plot twists are implausible. With a tighter grip on the characters, motives and science at its heart, Scott's imaginative tale might have been the horrifying, memorable thriller that it isn't. (May)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
