Tim Downs Plaguemaker

Plaguemaker

Tim Downs

Westbow, Jan 2006, $19.99, 368 pp.

ISBN 1595540229

In an apartment in the TriBeCa section of New York City, a man is found shot to death. FBI agent Nathan Baldwin, who works in the counterterrorism unit, is at the scene. There is a host of dead fleas in the apartment; fleas that are not the ordinary cat fleas but those that caused the bubonic plague during the Middle Ages. Someone killed the fleas after the man was murdered and a funeral urn that was in the apartment vanished.

Mr. Li calls Donovan re the fleas insisting he knows the man who owned them ahad someone put them in the apartment. He is Japanese scientist Soto Matushita who worked in a top secret site in Manchuria to develop a way of using the plague as a weapon of mass destruction. Soto hates the United States because his beloved sister died in the bombing of Hiroshima. He wants to kill as many Americans as possible and knows he can do it because he has been working on plague research since he left Japan for Russia and then for Syria where he is funded by Muslim extremists. Donovan leads the search for Soto but needs Li to identify him; Li has plans for the man who caused his great heartbreak.

Considering the headlines dealing with Avaian Flu, the events in PLAGUEMAKER seem all too plausible. Although one danger comes from nature and one comes from a science laboratory, both diseases have the potential to cause millions of deaths. Donovan is an angst ridden protagonist who believes Li's story and ends up with a quest he must succeed in or else plague will sweep over the city. Tim Downs has written an entertaining thriller that features two heroes that are generations apart yet share similar ideals. Fans of Jack Higgins and Tom Clancy will want to read this enthralling thriller.

Harriet Klausner