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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"The purest water on earth" is deadly..., September 24, 2011
The two doctors with the World Health Organization who appeared in the novel, Pandemic, Dr. Noah Haldane and Dr. Duncan McLeod, join forces with the European Union's department of agriculture representative Elise Renard to analyze several recent cases of what appears to be a variant of Creutzfelt-Jakob Disease. When the team arrives in Limoges, France, to begin their investigation into seven mad cows, they quickly discover that this rapidly accelerated vCJD is not a straight-forward situation of contaminated cows leading to human infection. They delve more deeply into the case and find what they believe is a link between the dead human victims -- is the link connected to the cows or to water all consumed before their deaths? Water that was given to them by a mutual acquaintance -- water with supposed healing properties that came from the huge recently tapped underground lake in Antarctica - Lake Vostok. The purest water on earth, untouched by pollution. The market for this drinking water will be huge and those that discovered and tapped it definitely anticipate the huge profits they will get when it is bottled and brought and sold to the type of people who will pay a hundred dollars or more for a single bottle. They need to solve the mystery fast. Unfortunately, as the reader suspects immediately, the water contains prions that act very rapidly to destroy the brains of those who consume it. In a race against time, the WHO team and Elise Renard try to find and stop the greedy owners who don't seem to care that they are selling a very horrible death along with the water. The reader knows the major characters involved in this complex coverup, but is not fully able to separate the good guys from the bad guys until almost the very end of the novel. It moves along at a nice pace, back and forth between the settings of French provincial farms and small cities, to the cold ice of the Antarctic. My favorite genre is the medical thriller and I read them mainly for the science and this idea of the CJD was original and well done. I knew that the doctors would save the world from drinking the contaminated water and having a massive CJD outbreak, but the story of how they solved the case was interesting and I really enjoyed it. I saw that Kalla has written another novel, Of Flesh and Blood, and I may have to read it at some point, but I'm really waiting for another with the Haldane and McLeod characters as I want to see what happens to them next!
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Bland, July 26, 2009
Written in 2008, Cold Plague's plot involves a prion filled ancient lake whose water is sold for profit. Unique and fascinating, the story lines were endless. Yet, Dr Kalla, a Canadian author/physician living in Canada choose to nauseatingly beat his relentless theme of the villain being yet another big bad capitalistic company this time either French/American or Russian (it was hard to tell). Doesn't Canada have any big bad Canadian companies? In addition, the writing itself fell short. It was not very suspenseful and most of the writing was bland. The ending was predicable long before the end with the story stuck in one gear with no real highs or lows.
After spending millions to drill for Antarctic oil (oil needed to heat homes/run cars, employ people and to not line the pockets of Middle East/South American enemies) the company is denied drilling rights. Denied their mean nasty oil profits, the corporate sponsors of this expedition turn lemon into lemonade and sell water instead. However, after finding out the water is poisonous, the big bad (Not Canadian) company decides to put profits before people and pedal knowingly dangerous water from Lake Vostok discovered while drilling to narcissistic vain health-seeking rich consumers in Bel Aire (that mean nasty U.S) and around the world claiming the water is everything from a beauty aid to a life extender. Don't they have stuck up narcissistic rich people in Canada either?
Dr Kalla is a physician employed by the Canadian universal health care industry turned author so naturally a magnanimous benevolent government plays the hero to the rescue in the form of government employed World Health Organization physicians and a French alphabet soup of bureaucracies to save the world from big bad capitalistic companies who pay the taxes that pay their salaries. His themes are as entrenched as the government bureaucracies he so loves.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid Biological Thriller, May 27, 2010
Cold Plague is an enjoyable Robin Cook, Michael Crichton-style thriller.
A bug from the Antarctic is threatening mankind, and it's up to our hero from the World Health Organization to figure out what the bug is--and stop it. The plot is suspenseful, and the environment of the French countryside is properly gloomy. The heroes and heroines of this story are all nicely drawn and sympathetic. The villains are a bit too one-dimensional for me. Despite the author's best intentions, the emotional core of this story is not the good WHO Doctor, but the French cop lady. Avril brought in the true humanity.
The science was great (I love it when real scientists write this sort of stuff). My major criticism (and why this novel didn't get five stars), is the stakes for humankind are just not high enough. Sure they COULD be. But only the potential threat is described in the novel. This story is just not disastrous enough! Sure, a few people are sickened, and there's lots of peripheral cover-up violence. But unless the stakes are highly personal (like the hero is under attack by the bug), or mankind is really being undone in relentless waves, I'm not completely satisfied.
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