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Dateline: Kampala, Uganda, sometime in the present or near future. Charles Mallory, a private security contractor with a CIA background, awaited the arrival of an African contact who would provide him with intelligence on a conflict brewing in the region. When the contact missed the rendezvous, Mallory assumed something had gone wrong. a hunch confirmed when a package delivered to his hotel turned out to contain his source's severed head. Journalist James Lilliefors is not one to bury the lede. He has concocted a high-stakes thriller that reads like an expose you never want to find on page one. The story features two brothers who have taken different paths in life, Charlie into clandestine work and Jon into journalism. They have grown distant over the years, but when Charlie becomes aware of a huge international health crisis, one that seems engineered by shadowy forces, his professional interest in keeping secrets is trumped by an urgent need to get the news out. He enlists Jon in a trip to West Africa to report on the catastrophic effects of an effort to spread a virulent infectious disease more deadly than the 1918 influenza pandemic. Is it a terrorist plot, a demented dream of ethnic cleansing, or a dangerous mutation of the military-industrial complex? Lilliefors does an excellent job of setting the scene with local color, but character development takes a backseat, and as the strong newswriting style carries the reader along, it sets up crosscurrents of skepticism when the reader's desire to suspend disbelief is thwarted by an inner fact checker (particularly given that the story involves two invented African countries not found on the map). The horror of the epidemic's spread may make the reader feel a little uncomfortable that so much human misery is being evoked in service of a story that would be at home in a wide-screen action thriller. The author, in short, has a rambunctious story that isn't always a good match for the crisp and evocative prose of good, solid reporting. That said, this subject, fraught with moral dilemmas, is timely just as our two most prestigious science journals have to weigh an official request to suppress research on genetic mutations of the bird flu virus for fear it could provide terrorists with a recipe for a highly-lethal contagion. Lilliefors leaves us thinking about how easily a biological weapon could get out of hand, and how frequently powerful people are tempted to shape the world to fit their vision. § Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.
Reviewed by Barbara Fister, April 2012
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