Plague Ship (utgåvan 2019)

Buried deep under the Andes mountains of Peru, an 5000-year-old plague waits to unleashed upon an unsuspecting world.

When Dr. Grant Reed is summoned to the medical relief ship Mercy, docked for repairs at Chimbote, Peru, to ascertain what might be wrong with his dying brother, he initially has no idea that the culprit is a virulent germ from the distant past. But as more and more people in the region are infected, it soon becomes clear that he's dealing with an epidemic.

Written over thirty years ago, Plague Ship is a medical thriller from a previous generation. Slaughter does an excellent job of communicating through fiction the medical realities of his day, though many of the processes and technologies described in the book have changed over the decades. The narrative reflects an older style as well, with more emphasis on describing events and surroundings than on drawing the reader into the scene. The book does contain some mild language and a few sex scenes, though interestingly all the romance is based on the foundational idea that marriage is the eventual and inevitable conclusion of a successful relationship--more evidence that this book is from a different era.

In an age of global concern about the possibility (or certainty) of a future pandemic similar to pandemics that have ravaged human populations in the past, a thirty-plus-year-old book about an ancient plague serves as a reminder that these fears are nothing new. Whether it's swine flu, avian flu, malaria, or the fictional Yungay fever, history teaches us that we are susceptible to illness on a global scale. Plague Ship is a generation-old testament to human frailty on a number of fronts. ( )