THE MOSQUITO WAR

A scuba diver and a gourmet caterer in her nonliterary life, MacAlister here crafts a debut thriller distinguished by its luminous underwater diving scenes and earnest focus on a Third World health crisis. As the book begins, pharmaceutical firm SeaGenesis has found a cure for malaria—a serum derived from sea sponges looking like spinach, and therefore labeled "popeye"—but the higherups cut funding for the project before the cure can be thoroughly tested. Frustrated Vietnamese lab assistant Su Thom, whose mother and brother died of malaria, decides to take matters into his own hands. How better to make Americans care about finding a cure than to toss two large jarfuls of mosquitoes bearing a fatal strain of malaria into a mall throng in Washington on July 4? Meanwhile, beautiful scuba-diving scientist Zee Aspen, who collects popeye for SeaGenesis, becomes suspicious when one too many accidents happen on the job. She joins forces with a rough-edged Robin Hood, Connor Gale, who works for a company providing private security for unscrupulous SeaGenesis and has also noticed that something fishy is going on. What is SeaGenesis's link to the CIA? And is Connor's adoptive father and boss hiding secrets of his own? Connor, the orphaned son of a smalltime thief and pickpocket, is a compelling character, and MacAlister crafts a convincing bioterrorist scenario. If her attempt to follow the lives of a selection of Americans bitten by malarial mosquitoes is a little forced, readers will forgive her once they make it to the novel's moving conclusion. (Sept.)