This engrossing thriller probably isn't the book to read while suffering from a sore throat caused by a staph infection. "The cocci were perfect spheres, like eggs or dark spawn.... They clumped. And they doubled.... Doubling every twenty minutes and clumping together in grape-like clusters.... Clumped in clusters that numbered eight million and then sixteen million and then an hour later 128 million perfect peptidoglycan-plated spheres ..." Philip Sington and Gary Humphreys, who wrote Carriers under the Patrick Lynch pseudonym, combine news from recent headlines--flesh-eating bacteria, the increasing resistance of bugs to antibiotics--with an imaginative but plausible scenario of rampant infection, bureaucratic fumbling, and corporate greed. Even the minor characters are fully sketched, which is not always the case in scientific thrillers.
This engrossing thriller probably isn't the book to read while suffering from a sore throat caused by a staph infection. "The cocci were perfect spheres, like eggs or dark spawn.... They clumped. And they doubled.... Doubling every twenty minutes and clumping together in grape-like clusters.... Clumped in clusters that numbered eight million and then sixteen million and then an hour later 128 million perfect peptidoglycan-plated spheres ..." Philip Sington and Gary Humphreys, who wrote Carriers under the Patrick Lynch pseudonym, combine news from recent headlines--flesh-eating bacteria, the increasing resistance of bugs to antibiotics--with an imaginative but plausible scenario of rampant infection, bureaucratic fumbling, and corporate greed. Even the minor characters are fully sketched, which is not always the case in scientific thrillers.