Richard Preston. The Cobra Event. 1997.

Functional thriller laced with factual information about biowarfare

Compared to Hot Zone, this novel is fraught with stylistically clunky moments and is not as well done. It contains interesting background on the US and Soviet biological weapons programs mingled with fiction such that it is hard to tell where exactly research ends and fiction begins. The weight of genre convention is at times smothering. On page 278 out of 415 I guessed accurately how the book would play out. There is much I would have advised the author to do differently, but my criticism may not exactly be warranted given that this is the author’s first novel, 415 pages in length, and a best-seller.

But still: a few threads are unrealistic despite the fact that they lead nowhere (the virus makes one infected person spectacularly homicidal and a theory is put forward to explain this and then the idea is dropped) and there are too many too implausible coincidences.

For example: it takes investigators one day to find the source of a carved wooden box. An expert tells them that the box appears to be of African origin, so they travel to Africa and start asking questions, without any more information than that. They just pick a city in Africa, approach some strangers, and start asking questions. By evening they have found the source of the box. And this unbelievable breakthrough doesn’t end up helping them solve the case, it is simply disbelief suspension for its own sake. Or: somehow recognizing in the nuances of a seizure the symptoms of an extremely rare genetic disease, the investigators are then able to find the New Jersey bioengineering company that manufactured the deadly bioweapon in one day, by coincidence running into somebody there they had met at a biological weapons facility in Iraq the previous week. Small world.

Or: they find the culprit while wandering aimlessly through Manhattan by coincidentally noticing a particular type of flower whose pollen was attached to the evidence, which is highly implausible for a few different reasons. And the romance between two lead investigators is as uninspired as it is obligatory.

This novel is immensely readable, but for a better book read Hot Zone or for a more informative book read Demon in the Freezer. But the 18-page autopsy scene is more intense than a Pynchon nose job.