Cold Plague [Mass Market Paperback]

Daniel Kalla (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2008

Pristine water possessing natural healing powers is found miles under Antarctic ice by a group of scientists who stand to make billions from its sale. While people around the world line up to buy the therapeutic water, new cases of mad cow disease explode in rural France. Dr. Noah Haldane and his World Health Organization team are urgently summoned.

Noah recognizes the deadliness of a prion, a microscopic protein that kills with the speed and ferocity of a virus, and Noah suspects that the prion's spread in France may not be a natural occurrence. Facing a spate of disappearances and unexplained deaths, Noah soon realizes that the scientific find of the century--a body of water the size of Lake Superior buried three miles under Antarctica--might hold the key to a microscopic Jurassic Park.

With a billion-dollar industry hanging on his silence, Noah has to stay alive long enough to sound the alarm.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In Kalla's meticulously detailed and carefully plotted new thriller, Dr. Claude Fontaine engineers a method to tap a huge, mysterious pool of fresh water two miles under the Antarctic ice without fear of contamination from our 21st-century toxins. His goal is to bottle this purest of waters and sell it for astronomical sums to health-seeking rich people everywhere. Meanwhile, infectious disease specialist Dr. Noah Haldane, hero of Kalla's Pandemic, along with his crusty, wisecracking Scottish sidekick, Duncan McLeod, travels to France to investigate seven cows that have tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalitis (aka mad cow disease). Several humans, the apparent victims of infected beef, have died horrible deaths. By the time the link between the Antarctic lake water and the mad cows becomes clear, many readers will find the journey too long and that in the end they don't really care that disaster has been narrowly averted and all those rich people have been saved. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Kalla’s latest medical thriller, following Blood Lies (2007), creates a very believable scenario about a prion-based disease (from the same type of organism that causes mad cow disease) that is unwittingly unleashed through samples from Antarctica’s underground body of water, Lake Vostok. Discovering that the million-year-old lake water may have healing properties, a group of entrepreneurs make plans to bottle and sell the solution, while covering up its lethal side effects. Dr. Noah Haldane and a World Health Organization team find themselves in a race to understand the mechanisms of the potentially world-threatening pathogen and stop the planned global distribution. Kalla develops his Robin Cook–like plot effectively, generating plenty of suspense and layering on the kind of scientific detail that fans of medical thrillers crave. Recommend this one to fans of Cook and other such other A-listers in the popular subgenre as Michael Palmer, Neil McMahon, and Joshua Spanogle. --Elliott Swanson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (November 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765357933
• ISBN-13: 978-0765357939
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 4.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,086,825 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #78 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Thrillers > Medical

More About the Author

Born, raised, and still residing in Vancouver, Kalla spends his days (and sometimes nights) working as an ER Physician in an urban teaching hospital.

The idea for his first medical thriller, PANDEMIC, sprang from his clinical experience in facing the SARS crisis of 2003. He has written five science thrillers and or medical mysteries, delving into themes and topics as diverse as superbugs, drug addiction, prions, DNA evidence, pandemics and patient abuse.

Kalla's sixth book, OF FLESH AND BLOOD, is a departure from the medical thriller genre. Featuring two multi-generational families, a major West Coast medical center and interwoven storylines, he tackles the human condition through the loves, lives and struggles of characters connected by lineage and bound by family secrets.

His books have been translated into ten languages, and Pandemic and Resistance have been optioned for feature films.

Daniel received his MD from the University of British Columbia. He is married and the proud father of two girls in a home predominated by the XX chromosome (even his beloved Labrador retriever, Lola, is female.)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

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

By 

Denise Crawford "DC" (Missouri, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cold Plague (Hardcover)

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!

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Bland, July 26, 2009

By 

Woodlandtrails - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cold Plague (Mass Market Paperback)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Solid Biological Thriller, May 27, 2010

By 

Emerald "book-nook" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cold Plague (Paperback)

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.