Dead On Arrival

Starred review from June 26, 2017
Richtel (The Doomsday Equation) grabs his audience by the throat from the start of this intelligent nail-biter, which riffs on the story line of The Langoliers, a Stephen King novella. Despite the absence of any ground communications, Eleanor Hall, a Delta Air Lines captain, safely lands her aircraft in Steamboat Springs, Colo., only to find that everyone outside the plane is dead. Desperate to understand what’s going on, she recruits the help of a passenger, doctor Lyle Martin, an expert on infectious diseases, whose career is on the decline. As Eleanor, Lyle, and her first officer, Jerry Weathers, try to determine how best to keep things calm in the plane’s cabin, they are further rattled when they discover that almost all the passengers have also suddenly died from no apparent cause. The narrative flashes back three years to an encounter Lyle had with Jackie Badger, whose life he once saved and whose gift at seeing hidden patterns has made her a valued asset for her employer, Google. Back in the present, Eleanor and company must battle a lethal virus that threatens all of humanity. Compelling characters that readers will become emotionally invested in complement the clever plotting. Agent: Laurie Liss, Sterling Lord Literistic.

In a thriller with the gut-wrenching tension of a doomsday countdown clock, Richtel (The Doomsday Equation, 2015, etc.) goes high concept, viewing worldwide connectivity through cell-level immunology. Observing our ever connected social media world, a crazy genius obsesses over the idea that "ubiquitous transmissions had the impact of putting people into kind of a catatonic state" and decides to press pause. After the rogue Google contractor recodes a good idea for nefarious purposes, the story begins when world-renowned infectious disease specialist Dr. Lyle Martin heads for a Colorado conference. Martin's been lured to the site of the wacko's beta test. From airport baggage handler on down, he discovers people comatose in midseizure. Puzzling enough, but he later comes awake home in San Francisco with the sketchiest of memories of the Colorado visit. Martin's a well-drawn character, a driven, obsessed man so smart his marriage collapsed because of his passion for his work. Supporting characters include his fellow witnesses to the Colorado episode, the female airline captain and her gun-toting first officer. Martin's ex-wife is another cast member done up in enviable style. The villain, not so much--standard Freudian twisted childhood warping into an Adam and Eve fantasy--all motivated by a god complex, because "people are gorging on ideas that reinforce their political and social views...losing their ability to empathize, cooperate, compromise." Toss in a massive march on Washington by gun owners worried about the Second Amendment, and things threaten to wobble toward social chaos. The theme is as current as tomorrow's news, but the pace sometimes outpaces clarity. More science faction than science fiction, this is a novel requiring close reading to comprehend, and fear.

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