What if perfect peace and happiness were a contagious disease? In this fast-paced, thought-provoking thriller, a schizophrenic scientist, an ambitious Chicago psychiatrist, and a hard-driving Army colonel are at the center of a frantic international struggle between the powers of government and a mind-bending outbreak of cosmic consciousness.
A bizarre illness spreads through a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Dr Carl Marley, a bored but ambitious psychiatrist, seizes the chance to grab some attention by “discovering” the new disorder. But when an Army colonel summons him to a government-sponsored taskforce to investigate the syndrome, he learns the disease he thought he’d discovered is already so widespread in the military that it threatens to undermine the foundations of power. A high-stakes race to understand the disease takes the team from the NIH campus in Bethesda, to a war zone in the Kashmiri highlands, to a high-tech biodefense facility near Juneau, Alaska.
As the outbreak spreads around the globe and desperate governments impose increasingly severe measures to contain it, Marley begins to suspect that what is happening is not the apocalypse they fear — but something far more radical. Marley’s star patient, a brilliant but profoundly psychotic scientist named Roger Sturgeon, escapes from the facility into the city, and Marley attempts to bring him back before the government sends in troops. Only then does he learn the truth about what is happening.
Before it’s over they will all be forced to choose between the precarious comfort of the world they know and the mysterious wonder of a new reality — between their commonplace fears, ambitions, and loyalties, or the hope that lies in The Nirvana Plague.
