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The jungle of Sumatra in Indonesia is the primary setting for this story. It is where Dr. Jonathan Rhodes has set up his makeshift research facility to conduct studies on the medicinal plants in that area. It is his hope that he can convince an over-consuming planet the benefits of maintaining the fragile eco-systems with their wondrous bounty of flowers and wildlife that may one day save humankind from a deadly illness or disease. For an opportunity of a life-time experience, his two daughters, Emma and Lucy, have flown over from the States to visit with him at “Camp Rafflesia”; so aptly named after the parasitic flower that smells like rotting flesh and is known to the locals as “the corpse Lily”.
Hundreds of miles away, Lieutenant Colonel Carmen Travis, Head of the Pathology Division at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick has seen her share of rotting flesh. As a career pathologist in the Army, she has specialized in studying some of the scariest viruses known to man and rarely seen outside of a Biohazard Level 4 Lab. Ebola…Marburg…hemorrhagic fever…. It is because of this specialty area of science she is so intimately familiar with that puts Carmen in the leadership role of the research team being sent to Sumatra to investigate why certain monkeys in a primate quarantine facility in Marshallton are turning up sick and dying. The common thread; all the captured primates have been marked with a red dye – the tagging method used by the Sumatran monkey hunter known as Ahmad.
As this book weaves its way through the animal trade for research that is the way of life for many people living in developing countries, it is heart wrenching to read how the animals are captured, transported and caged. It is equally unsettling to learn how the world of animal research actually works. The process that enables scientists to trace the spread of a virus back to its source is described in length but in layman’s terms so it is relatively easy to follow.
At the point in the story when the military staff from Fort Detrick are called in to do the scientific investigation, the reader becomes certain there is going to be trouble. With three forces at odds against each other – the military mentality; both the Indonesian as well as the American, Corporate American greed in the form of the pharmaceutical business and finally, politics – that of a developing country that allows criminals to hide in plain site against the political system of a super power that will do anything to maintain levels of secrecy – nothing good is the expected outcome.
Usually stories such as this have predictability about where they are going and how they are going to get there. This is not the case with this book. It leads you down a path of certainty like a well mapped road…then it takes a sharp left.
This story is not for the faint of heart. The symptoms of disease are very descriptive and disturbing. What is even more unnerving is the fact that this story is entirely and easily possible. This one sentence from the book sends that message home – “Londoners would be intent on their business, meeting their deadlines, unaware of the submicroscopic passenger that had left the Sumatran rain forest and made the brief journey across the time zone in Jarvis’ bloodstream.”
Definitely a stick-with-it-to-the end book, don’t assume the story is going to have that natural progression to it that normally occurs with stories of this genre for even at the very last paragraph of this book, it will make you think…hhmmm…