The Deep Zone

January 30, 2012
In Tabor’s first novel, a routine near-future medical thriller, a new, lethal, and contagious bacterial infection has reached the U.S. through stricken American soldiers wounded in Afghanistan shipped home. To the rescue comes Dr. Hallie Leland, who was forced to resign from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to avoid criminal charges that she sold government secrets. Before her unceremonious ouster, Leland was close to creating a superantibiotic from an extreme organism she recovered from a Mexican cave. With disaster looming, she and her team enter the lawless area of Mexico where the cave is located, to retrieve more of the organism in a Hail Mary effort to stop the killer bacteria. Readers should be prepared for stock, often implausible action sequences underground. Despite the author’s considerable experience with deep-cave exploration (he’s the co-creator of the History Channel’s Journey to the Center of the World), Tabor fails to make the best use of that expertise. Agent: Ethan Ellenberg, Ethan Ellenberg Literary Agency.

March 1, 2012
A super-lethal, fast-spreading bacterium that eats its victims from the inside out is decimating U.S. troops in Afghanistan and posing the threat of a pandemic. To collect rare biomatter that works as an antidote, members of a top-secret disease-control agency risk their lives in the deepest and scariest caves of Mexico. If the dangers of spelunking--or a violent army of local drug dealers--don't thwart them, a mole working for a nefarious international group might. Since being drummed out of BARDA (Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority) a year ago on false charges, expert caver Hallie Leland has been running a dive shop in northern Florida. Though still bitter over her treatment, she agrees to lead a government expedition thousands of feet beneath a remote forest--"Journey to the Center of the Earth, but worse"--when her onetime mentor spells out the global threat of the drug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. In Afghanistan, Army nurse Lenora Stilwell is risking her life tending to soldiers infected by the ACE, possibly through their widespread use of tampons to stanch wounds. Like Leland, she must cope with male superiors more interested in following procedure and saving face than saving lives. Tabor, a bestselling nonfiction writer (Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth, 2010, etc.), makes a solid debut as a novelist. The narrative is a bit lumpy, the suspense a bit forced: Hallie is subjected to more near-death experiences than the story can bear. But she's a strong, appealing protagonist, as is Stilwell in her brief scenes. And with his evocative descriptions, Tabor succeeds in portraying the mysterious Cueva de Luz (Cave of Light) as a living, evolving, spiritually charged organism. The outcome may be conventional, but the writing brims with intelligence. A smart, informative debut thriller with a pair of assertive heroines that draws us into the strange wonders of inner space.

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November 1, 2011
With a terrifying pandemic threatening, scientist Hallie Leonard is sent into the world's deepest cave to find an organism that promises a cure. Alas, someone on Hallie's team wants her to fail. Tabor knows about caves, as evidenced by his best-selling "Blind Descent", and his past life as a Washington, DC, cop means that he knows about crime, too. Good publicity on this first novel, so thriller fans should pay attention.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2012
A disease with a high mortality rate appears in soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. Researchers are stumped, but finally a possible cure is discovered. A substance at the bottom of the deepest cave in the world, dubbed moonmilk, might stop the contagion in its tracks. Can a team of scientists and soldiers retrieve the material in time? The hype surrounding this fiction debut compares the reading experience it's supposed to give to James Rollins meeting Journey to the Center of the Earth. Though not quite as exciting as that suggests, the book still packs a wallop. Toss in a little of Michael Crichton's science with a pinch of David Baldacci's political thrillers, and you have a story engineered to appeal to all varieties of thriller fan. The final third takes readers on an incredibly intense ride that more than makes up for the slower but still intriguing beginning.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)