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From the very first paragraph, SLATEWIPER grabs you and doesn't let you go. "Typhoon clouds churned across Tokyo's September skies. Beneath the clouds, down in the unfashionable northern prefecture of Toshima, workers at Otsuka General Hospital struggled through the gathering noontime dusk to clear the sidewalks of the dead and dying before the torrential rains began to fall." The 'Korean leprosy' is 100 per cent fatal. People who contract the disease have sores, diarrhea and intense pain as their flesh dissolves and their limbs fall off. After death, the flesh continues to melt until the corpse turns to jelly and explodes. Dr Iwamoto, chief administrator of the hospital, tells two American Army doctors that since only Koreans seem to be affected by the disease, it is not important, let them die. Back in Maryland, Dr Lara Blackwood, founder and CEO of GenIntron Corporation, drives past the hordes of demonstrators into the compound, only to be met by a bank president and past board member who tells her that the Japanese company to which she had been forced to sell GenIntron has called in the loan and she is to leave immediately, without gaining access to her office or her personal space or research. When she discovers that her life's work, the thrust of which was to find a cure for genetic diseases such as Tay-Sachs or Sickle Cell Anemia, has been perverted and used to kill certain segments of a population, she is horrified, and realizes she must discover who is behind this terrible scheme. If you like medical doomsday thrillers, this is for you. It is situation-driven with characters whose only function is to move the action along, but there is plenty of action and the story leaves one with lots to think about. Could this happen here? You bet it could.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, March 2005
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