cover image The Carrier

The Carrier

Holden Scott. St. Martin's Press, $24.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-312-20583-6

In a medical thriller that's a fast-moving but far-fetched follow-up to his debut Skeptic, Scott throws caution to the wind. Harvard Ph.D. candidate Jake Collier is expelled from school for plagiarism. Collier has been framed, however--by his acclaimed but corrupt mentor, Michael Dutton, who has plotted against his prot g to steal his breakthrough cure for cancer, which involves training flesh-eating bacteria to attack tumors rather than healthy flesh. Collier steals back the cure, and goes in search of his lost love, Angie, who is dying of ovarian cancer and whom he hopes to save. But something goes terribly wrong with the miracle cure, turning Collier unwittingly into the carrier of a deadly mutant strain that decimates a human body within seconds of physical contact with the carrier. After he leaves a trail of bodies in New York's Penn Station, the FBI becomes involved, but Collier evades both thuggish agent Vincent Moon, who has orders to kill him on sight, and Bureau scientist Tyler Ross, who isn't so quick to perceive the carrier as a monster. During a cross-country chase, Collier realizes why his body has turned deadly; with Ross on his side, he must escape the blood lust of Moon if he is going to transform from murderous to miraculous. The novel exhibits a hell-bent momentum that makes for quick reading, but inconsistencies hamper its flow. Characters are hobbled by cliched dialogue and colorless personalities, and the final plot twists are implausible. With a tighter grip on the characters, motives and science at its heart, Scott's imaginative tale might have been the horrifying, memorable thriller that it isn't. (May)