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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
Ripping good yarn, September 18, 2004
Since I don't read thrillers all that often, I can't say whether or not the events of September 11, 2001 fundamentally changed the genre. You would think that dark day would, though. I suspect the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon provided writers of medical, biological, and terrorist themed thrillers with a plethora of plot narratives to exploit. I do know writers in this genre are particularly sensitive to whatever threats the United States faces at the moment, as well they should be. A few years ago I read one of these books that dealt with the rise of a dangerous religious cult, right around the time the Heaven's Gate group went bonkers. September 11, 2001 sits in a league of its own, with the threat of nuclear, biological, and chemical disasters hovering over our heads even three years later. The opportunities for terrorists to strike at us are endless, and so are the possibilities for writing a book about Islamic fundamentalists threats. "The Jihad Virus" is such a novel, a book detailing the potential dangers of an Al-Qaeda type group attacking the United States with a modified form of everyone's favorite friend from yesteryear, smallpox.
The story of this potentially catastrophic disaster comes to us in the form of a narrative told by Phineus "Fin" Morton, a reporter whose beat covers the medical field. He's the guy who punches up the articles on the latest cancer treatments or the groundbreaking work in the field of virus research. Old Fin knows he's on to something huge when he attends what he thought would be a routine press conference in the Pacific Northwest. It's hardly routine. Morton is on hand to hear the details of a smallpox outbreak near the Canadian border. The authorities downplay the incident, of course, but then announce they're bringing in Stuart Holloman, head of a huge research laboratory named Immune Corporation, to help contain the problem. We learn this is the company that developed a cure for one of those nasty African viruses, and that they hope to study the potential lethality of this latest outbreak. Fin Morton immediately hops to it, securing an interview with Holloman at his office and thus positioning himself at ground zero if a big story should break. While Fin doesn't care a whit for Stuart Holloman, rightly ascertaining the guy's a greedy capitalist posing as a researcher so he can make big bucks in the research field, the reporter comes to a different conclusion when he meets Immune Corporation's star researcher Peyton McKean.
McKean, it turns out, was the guiding light behind the African virus cure. Holloman keeps the guy under wraps so the competition can't get their greedy mitts on him. The scientist, a deep thinking but easy going chap, takes a shine to Morton and quickly shows him everything that goes on in the laboratory. Before you can say "smallpox," McKean receives a call from his squirrelly cousin Mike about weird goings on at a ranch out in the hinterlands. According to the phone call, some Yemeni billionaire named Sheik Abdul-Ghazi is up to no good. Mike claims he saw some men taking a handcuffed woman into an outbuilding, a woman the press recently reported missing from a bar in Seattle. Peyton McKean and Fin Morton, their suspicions aroused, decide to drive out to Mike's place to investigate. Sure, it would be easier to tell everything they suspect to the FBI, but both men have good reason to suspect one of the agents might not be on the up and up, so they go it alone. Bad mistake. The Sheik and his minions are producing the engineered smallpox, and they promptly pull a nasty trick on Morton, McKean, and Mike after catching the trio snooping around the ranch. What follows is non-stop action as our heroes must stop the terrorists from destroying America, save their own lives, and produce a cure. Fin Morton must also decide what to do about his feelings for a beautiful Egyptian horse trainer named Jameela Noori.
There is no other way to do this than to come right out and say it: "The Virus Jihad" is a smashing great thriller, a book that moves faster than Fin Morton's stripped down Jaguar. Author Thomas Hopp is eminently qualified to write a biological thriller, considering his background as a biotechnologist and founder of a multi-billion dollar research company, but who would have thought a guy accustomed to test tubes and microscopes could pen such a nail biting thriller? You get car chases, a beautiful woman, shootouts, crooked cops, a deadly plague, and romance all in the space of 213 pages. You get fundamentalist terrorists encoding engineered viruses with scientific ciphers spelling out "DIE DIE DIE." And you get enough twists and turns to satisfy even the most jaded reader. Sure, a few of the events in the narrative are implausible, such as the fortuitous phone call from Mike, or the incredible luck involved in patching together a workable vaccine, but implausibility in this case doesn't interfere at all with the book's impact. "The Jihad Virus" is an immensely entertaining book.
The best aspect of Hopp's story, in my opinion, is how he doesn't assume his readers know a lot about virology, biology, and any other related -ologies. He explains in minute but easily understandable detail what McKean does in the laboratory, how scientists study viruses, and how a combination of egos and corporate red tape often ties up scientific discoveries. I'm familiar with the wacky world of academia, but the connect the dots approach to cutting edge biotechnology sure helped this science dummy feel better. If you love thrillers, I can't imagine you wouldn't heartily enjoy "The Jihad Virus."
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