Midnight Plague

Starred review from June 27, 2005
An impressive follow-up to Keizer's debut, The Longest Night
, this grandly imagined, character-driven novel of action and intrigue overflows with biological brinksmanship and nerve-jangling suspense. With less than a week before the Allies launch their D-Day armada, Frank Brink, M.D., is working with the British to develop antibiotics against anthrax, which other members of his team plan to use as a biological weapon. Called in to examine the corpses of 13 Jews ferried across the channel by a French fisherman and his petite daughter, Alix Pilon, an unlikely leader in the French Resistance, Brink discovers that they've been purposefully infected with pneumonic plague, one of the world's most virulent diseases. Racing against time, Brink is sent with Alix and two British commandos to find the German lab responsible and destroy it before the invasion is launched. Meanwhile, German mastermind SS Major Doktor Wollenstein has ordered the civilian Kriminalpolizei
detective Kirn to find the missing Jews, telling him they are infected with typhus (though Kirn knows otherwise, and that his countrymen are in grave danger). With D-Day fast approaching, Brink finds an entire village already verging on an epidemic, as moral conflicts build tension to a stunning climax in this epic parable on the ethics of war.

August 15, 2005
Keizer's ("The Longest Night") second thriller deals with the threat of biological warfare on the eve of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Frank Brink, an American doctor in the British service, has been involved in the production of anthrax bacteria. When a female colleague dies as a result of their work, he dedicates himself to finding an antibiotic that will stop not only the spread of anthrax but also a deadly pneumonic plague that the Germans are developing. This dual threat becomes even more real when a boatload of dying Jews washes up on the English coast. The sole survivor leads Brink and his Special Ops watchdog, Juniper Wickens, to France in search of the lab where the Jews were infected and where an SS doctor has both perfected a method to disperse plague bacilli and discovered an antidote to protect German troops. With the imminent invasion in peril and plenty of obstacles in his way, Brink must find and destroy the lab. Dense with incident and sprinkled with authentic historical details, the tightly entwined plot requires attentive reading, particularly during the action-packed conclusion. Forgiving readers will overlook occasionally disjointed prose, stilted language in the midst of action (fingers choking a doctor are bent back "against the metacarpophalangeal joints"), and moments that stretch believability. A discretionary purchase for larger collections where World War II thrillers are in demand. -Ronnie H. Terpening, Univ. of Arizona, Tucson

Copyright 2005 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2005
In this clever cross of biothriller and historical espionage novel, a Nazi doctor perfecting an unstoppable airborne strain of plague that may turn the tide of war against the massing Allied invasion loses a truckload of Jewish "guinea pigs" who are smuggled across the English Channel. Frank Brink, an American doctor who has abandoned a British anthrax project after it killed his best girl--and who now finds himself in the tenuous moral position of seeking a cure to pestilence so that one side may use it against the other--follows a trail of blackened corpses across enemy lines searching for the plague's source in the French countryside. Meanwhile, a German cop looks for the missing Jews. No " Eye of the Needle," the action-crammed story's credibility suffers from galloping plot complications, most traceable to the exasperating impetuousness of ingenue freedom-fighter Alix, whose raison d'etre seems to be throwing a spanner in the works at almost every turn. Follett fans may pardon these excesses as the bodies pile up, and the clock ticks down to either D-Day or doomsday.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)