cover image SLEEPER CELL

SLEEPER CELL

Jeffrey J. Anderson, . . Berkley, $7.99 (336pp) ISBN 978-0-425-19979-4

At the start of Dr. Anderson's thought-provoking debut medical thriller, people are dying in Los Angeles from what appears to be a new, unknown virus. At the same time, a Web site in Indonesia warns of Allah's "nanodeath" holocaust: "His nanomachines cannot be stopped until they have destroyed every American man, woman, and child." A team of scientists spring into action to trace the origin of the bug, finding what appears to be "a microscopic machine that can reproduce itself... essentially an artificial virus." Casualties begin to mount while the team struggles to catch up; meanwhile, politicos in Washington make plans to use the attack as grounds for military action they had already been seeking to carry out. The author does a great job of building excitement by interweaving the more bookish, scientific passages with espionage involving embedded terrorists, counteragents and rogue university professors. If scenes involving Washington decision makers are oversimplified, they successfully show how cause and effect, in times of war, are almost never clearly connected. Anderson doesn't shy away from his story's natural climax (though his fictional president closes on an upbeat note, it's far from a happy ending), making this book much more cautionary than the average escapist thriller. Agent, Kimberly Whalen. (Apr.)