Toxic Prey by John Sandford (Crime Thriller, 2024).
US Marshal Lucas Davenport and his daughter Letty (an agent with the Department of Homeland Security) are among the veteran author’s most popular characters. Sometimes, like in this case, they team up for dangerous and exciting adventures. In this case, they’re key elements in a group hunting down a British expert in tropical diseases whose real life experiences and belief in the Gaia Hypothesis have him ready to sacrifice up to half the world’s human population in order to stop Global Warming and other man-created problems that threaten all life on Earth.
Having recruited an unknown number of fellow believers, Dr. Lionel Scott has managed to merge the measles virus (perhaps the most infectious microbe out there) with the often-fatal Marburg virus (a rare cousin of Ebola). If his followers can spread the resulting pathogen worldwide via airports in the US Southwest, a pandemic dwarfing Covid by orders of magnitude would result. Such a pandemic would end overpopulation, it’s true–by only at the cost of billions of lives.
The Gaia idea is that all lifeforms on the planet are each only components of a single super organism. And there’s no denying the interconnection of various species in what modern biologists call the web of life. The ongoing and worldwide mass extinction event we are experiencing today is largely driven by human activity. That much is good solid science. But most scientists believe less extreme solutions (short of Scott’s auto-genocide plot) can yet be implemented–if the political and social will can be summoned in time.
But Lucas, Letty, MI5 operative Alec Hawkins and other law-enforcement and anti-terrorism specialists who become involved have little interest in these possible alternatives. In the book, they’re not even given lip-service aside from a single throwaway line about carbon confinement (itself a dubious proposition at best). They are, above all else, out to stop Scott and his cult-like followers from triggering their extreme solution.
The author wisely doesn’t paint Scott and most of his crew as mere raving lunatics, though. The book starts with an incident eleven months before his plot is ready to blossom, in which the doctor goes out of his way to save an innocent stranger’s life. Likewise, some of his fellow plotters show levels of understanding and thoughtfulness. They may be fanatics (and may be wrong about the urgency of the matter, though even that is not seriously addressed), but they are not insane–with the exception of a wealthy backer, and even she has a long history of supporting charities that sought to help/not harm humanity and life itself.
In any case, this is a pretty great chase novel. The investigators know very little about the threat they face at first, but become ever-more gung-ho as the gravity of the situation is made plain to them. Simultaneously, we get plenty of family drama dynamics (tough-cop Lucas is suspicious of the budding relationship between Hawkins and his daughter). Hawkins in particular is not happy with the ‘kill on sight’ idea that develops as things reach a series of desperate climaxes, the stakes growing higher with each encounter. But he follows through when things turn inevitable. Sandford doesn’t shy away from the limited but brutal mass-death situation that results from the incomplete successes of the plotters, although it seems he just couldn’t bring himself to kill off any of his most central characters (Toxic Prey is, after all, just the latest in a long-running series of novels). That is, I admit, a spoiler–but the fear and pain these central characters manifest ring true enough that it didn’t ruin the book for me. You don’t WANT Lucas or Letty or Letty’s new love to bite the dust, and the eventual recovery of those who become infected is, within the dynamics of series literature, no huge surprise.
It would’ve been a bold move indeed to snuff either Lucas or Letty or even the newcomer Hawkins. It might’ve even elevated the thing from pretty great to outright classic tragedy. Yet he does hit the emotional bull’s-eye with the description of the illness our infected heroes endure and the understated way he notes 60-plus deaths, including ‘all those under age 13.’
jimleeauthor 