The First Horseman - Softcover

Case, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099184028 ISBN 13: 9780099184027

Publisher: Arrow, 1999

Synopsis

In the Book of Revelations, the Four Horsemen herald the arrival of the Apocalypse. When the First Horseman thunders forth, pestilence will spread throughout the land. For the First Horseman is Plague... The Spanish Flu killed thirty million people worldwide in 1918. Now, with history threatening to repeat itself, a scientific expedition speeds toward a remote island in the Arctic Sea to recover strains of the lethal virus preserved under layers of ice. For Washington Post reporter Frank Daly, it is the story of a lifetime. But his plan to join the expedition is ruined by a ferocious storm that delays him. And when he meets up with the ship upon its return to port in Norway, it is clear that something has gone terribly wrong. Fear haunts the faces of the crew. No one will talk. And someone wants Daly to stop asking questions. But if there's a wall around the facts, Daly will batter it down. Persistent and resourceful, he knows how to get answers when none are given. Yet the more he uncovers, the more dangerous the stakes become. Until at last he comes face-to-face with a shocking secret, pitching him into a harrowing race to prevent nothing less than... apocalypse.

About this title

Review:

The ideal destructive plague is one which is passed on before it kills, one which is in the air we breathe and the fevered skin we touch. John Case drops heavy hints to the well-informed as to what is at stake in his new techno- thriller early on, when the sole survivor of a North Korean village sterilised by its own government's bombers babbles uncomprehendingly about a "Spanish Lady". He confirms them by sending a party of American scientists to excavate a group of miners caught in permafrost since 1918; bodies which prove, scarily, to be long gone with only a painted white horse in their place. A woman bacteriologist and an overbearing science journalist put together bits of the story that their government is scared of anyone knowing. Members of a pseudo-scientific cult carry out terrible murders--frying the over-curious in a giant microwave--for what they regard as the long-term good of the planet.

There are comparatively few surprises here, but ingenious plotting and a pervading sense of horrid possibility; Case knows his biotechnology and has a healthy paranoia about all of the possible groups that might abuse its power. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

"Expertly researched and chillingly related - terrifying - the sort of thriller which defies you to look away" (Express on Sunday)

About this edition

• Publisher: Arrow
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0099184028
• ISBN 13: 9780099184027
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432