Review: Pandemic

Book Review: Pandemic, by AG Riddle, 4 stars


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A hundred miles north of Alaska, a US Coast Guard research vessel discovers a sunken submarine. It has no national identification. No corporate identity. It has been down there for decades, and deep inside, teams find evidence of an experiment that may answer the deepest mysteries of human existence.
Ten days later, in a remote village in Kenya, several local residents contract a mysterious disease. The next day, two American aid workers fall ill. The WHO and CDC send teams, led by Dr. Peyton Shaw--an epidemiologist who has stopped some of the most deadly outbreaks in recent history. Peyton is good at her job, but she is driven by her own dark secret--and haunted by mysteries in her past.
What Peyton finds in Kenya is an outbreak very different from any she has ever seen. As the pandemic sweeps the globe, Peyton is drawn deeper into a conspiracy of unimaginable scope, a plot that appears to be linked to her past. The answers, and the key to stopping the pandemic, are revelations that carry a price--for all of us.

Genre: fiction/suspense

Publication date: April 2017

Mature content: yes

Review: Pandemic is a very well written book, but it was not what I expected at all. I thought I was going to read about a disease turning into a pandemic and instead I fell into the middle of an international conspiracy, one that apparently had been going on for two thousand years.

The plot is cleverly weaved, with all the parallel stories merging together at the end, and there are so many unexpected twists that you won't be able to put it down.


It is a very long book though, at almost seven hundred pages, and in some places I felt I was being given too much detail. Clearly Pandemic is the product of extensive research, but there's a limit to the information you can pass on and still keep the reader interested. I, for example, was totally lost in the middle of the description of the uniforms of the CDC employees and various other agencies. I read it, promptly forgot it, as it was not relevant for the story, and moved on to the next action scene.

For that reason, I'm rating it with four stars instead of five. It's still a great book, but it could be made shorter without any significant loss of meaning. I also thought the end was a bit disappointing, after all those pages, but I guess that's in preparation for the next book in the series, Genome (The Extinction Files Book 2).  

Happy readings,

the book worm, book blog

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