Leslie Norins, MD, PhD, with the help of Thomas Hauck, turns decades of medical research and infectious disease experience into a riveting fictional thriller about smallpox bioterrorism.
Porter Goss, former Director of the CIA, comments: "This assessment of the danger of smallpox seems credible to me.." Sir Gustav Nossal, a leading Australian medical scientist, reviewed: "A masterly suspense novel with a credible scenario by a medical scientist who really knows what he is talking about. A compulsive must-read." Though eradicated worldwide in 1980, smallpox poses a very real threat to national security today. No longer protected by group immunity, Americans are vulnerable to biological attack by enemies spreading the virus.
In Deadly Pages, retired US Army and CDC officer Dr. Martin Riker must deal with such a threat.
Brought out of retirement to investigate the death of a Syrian man who dies of smallpox, Riker traces the deadly virus back to a terrorist cell. Charged with infiltrating the network, he discovers they obtained the virus from a rogue Russian who cultivates biological agents in an abandoned pharmaceutical plant. Now, the cell plans to send the virus to the United States and put it right into the hands of unsuspecting Americans.
From New York City to Syria and back again, Deadly Pages follows Dr. Riker's race to stop the dissemination of a disease with the power to kill 70 percent of the population.
Masterfully plotted and brilliantly researched, this novel will keep you glued to the page until the very end.
About the Author: Leslie Norins, MD, PhD, received a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MD from Duke University School of Medicine, and a PhD from the University of Melbourne, where he trained with Nobel Prize winner Sir Macfarlane Burnet.
Dr. Norins directed a major laboratory at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before becoming a medical publisher. For three decades he created resources providing news and advice for health care professionals around the world. He was elected a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and has served on committees of the National Institutes of Health and the World Health Organization.
Dr. Norins lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.
Novelist and book editor Thomas Hauck has published numerous works of fiction, including Pistonhead, the story of a rock musician; The Body on the Rocks, a collection of crime stories set in his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts; and the Kevin Lone international thriller series.
