When he was a boy, one of my fellow EfM colleagues was taken to see The Ten Commandments. He still remembers how terrified he was that night that the green slime of one of the Plagues of Egypt was gong to creep down the wall of his bedroom. His dad had to come in to calm him down. Imagine if one of those plagues should strike the modern world. How frightening would that be? James Rollins shows us in his latest Sigma Force novel, The Seventh Plague (#630).
An archaeologist stumbles out of the desert after going missing for two years, but dies before he can reveal where he's been or what he has discovered. His partly mummified body is the source of a strange and deadly disease which claims its victims within hours. Sigma Force is called in when an old friend of Painter Crowe asks for their help while studying the body. She is abducted on camera while the two are skyping. Meanwhile, an attempt is made to snatch the professor's daughter at their cottage in a medieval English town. Sigma operative Seichan recognizes one of the team as a member of the former Guild. Nothing good can possibly come from their involvement, but who has hired them, and for what purpose? Before Sigma Force can rest, they will have ventured from deepest, darkest Africa to the forbidding Arctic Canadian Island of Ellesmere on the trail of discoveries by Dr. Livingston, Mr. Stanley, Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain.
As always, the scariest part of these novels is the science behind the story which makes the nightmare scenarios so very plausible. Could a microbe have been the source of the Nile turning blood red and spawning the plagues of frogs and locusts? And could the Exodus of Jewish slaves from Egypt have happened much earlier? These are some of the intriguing crumbs Rollins throws out to his readers. Entertaining and thought provoking!
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