SECTOR C [Kindle Edition]

This was a great read - and the author really seems to know her stuff on the scientific issues. The book reminded me a bit of Jurassic Park (which I also loved). The first half is spent trying to figure out the mystery and the second half turns into a faster-paced action story. The ending felt a bit anti-climactic though, but this wasn't enough to make me take a star off. Recommended.

The premise, doomsday by prion, is interesting, scary. I liked the characters (the good guys, I mean.) The science, well, I don't know enough about prions or cloning or extracting viable dna from ice-age mammals to know if developments in the novel are even viable in the near future.

The writing, well, there are a lot of speeches. Snappy it's not. Yet the really interesting stuff, like what, exactly, the vectors are (why didn't some people get infected?) and what's happening to the human population and did it spread outside of the quarantine area (those CEOs that died and their families, etc.) and what's happening with the "cure" (was the disease progressing in our heroine or was it arrested?) -- you know, the actual impact beyond millions of dead non-human mammals, the allusions to "things are gonna be different," -- all this stuff just wasn't there. It just jumped from being fraught to wishy washy. Like the author ran out of steam.

Then there is the silly stuff, like the weird ranks in the national guard and the president and not the governor calling them out, the CIA having anything to do with law enforcement (especially on US soil), and the entire dropped storyline -- you know, those dozen guys who burned down the fence and planned to storm Triple E, whatever happened with them? Thwarting international transaction by bureaucracy is also a stretch -- it would take too long and at by the point this transaction was caught by the government, the knowledge transfer would already have taken place. And what difference does it make anyway, once the government decided it was a matter of national security to ignore ownership (which makes sense), it means that anyone can come up with the alleged cure?

It's a lot of money for half a story.

Sector C starts slowly with a lot of viewpoints. There's a lot of information to take in. But the patient reader is rewarded: once the story starts moving, this techno-thriller lives up to the genre. The near-future scenario is easy to imagine and the medical response and corporate motivations all too believable. At its heart, though, this novel is about hope, not dystopia.

Well worth a read.