A Jerk, a Jihad, and a Virus

"He read the cell phone instructions from cover to cover--possibly the first male ever to do so."

Can a terrorist plot to infect schools, airports and shopping malls be both scientifically accurate and laugh out loud funny? In a word, damn right. This clever book puts the fate of the world in the hands of a couple of PhDs. Jason is the one in the t-shirt and cut-offs; the villain wears Prada.

A grad student, recently arrived from Hong Kong, causes a SARS mutation to break out of the animal lab. "Diseases carried by wild animals, such as Ebola, Marburg virus, SARS, and West Nile virus, are often more virulent when they infect people than they were in the original host. Any of those diseases can become potential pandemics." 

When ten vials of the infectious material go missing the story follows the abrasively smug and startlingly inept Ahmed through a travelogue of Arab countries, painting vivid word pictures. "Hard boiled eggs were purchased from urchins at the side of the road," while the scents of "garlic, fenugreek, cardamom, ginger, roast chicken and lamb" fill the steamy air. The decriptions of "blowing refuse, mud, and stinking hovels" in the world's richest oil countries are spot-on.

Hot Zone meets The Jerk in this smile-worthy new book from Gary F. Jones. I'm giving it five stars for the hitting two of my sweet-spots: epidemics and literary lunacy.

I received this book in exchange for an honest review.

I made a mistake when I started reading this book. I failed to see the obvious which is clear in the title alone. This book is SATIRE!!

Once I realized this, then it all made sense about why the story telling was so "poor" and full of holes and implausible scenes. 

In proper context, it's hilarious. One of the biggest things that the book turns on it's end in the spy genre... the concept that the two sides and agents of them, don't know what the other is doing. One "spy" blatantly gives away his identity to his university friend that has been assigned to try and gain information from him!  The friend is very inept anyways so our villain spy says: (paraphrased) "I know what you're doing, here's the information you want. I'm just here because I love your big screen TV. I wrote it out for you so you can take it to your boss, I know you won't remember but after this, you'll have to memorize what I let slip."

The reference is a bit butchered in trying to use it as an example. In full context, it's funnier. But a direct passage about our inept university American spy...

"Honey, I love you dearly, but you aren't cut out for that type of work. It'll take three guards working full time to keep you from saying the wrong thing in public. I can picture you spotting [...], and yelling 'I see him, I see him.'"

Here's another juicy bit:
"A woman assaulted him?"
"Ahmed offended a feminist with martial arts training."
Someone said, sotto voce, "Rush Limbaugh's greatest fear." A ripple of laughter went through the room.

Then there were the goats... which had me laughing for a good 5 minutes.

I'm going to round up to 4 stars but really this is about a 3 and 2/3rds star for me. 

Because the one problem I had with this book. It went on too long. It kept losing my attention during the longer bits of complex machinations to keep the plot going. The humor wasn't sustained through all of them. At least not for me. My friend LOVED every bit of it and gave it a 5 star so definitely a YMMV, your mileage may vary. 

Thank you to the publisher for providing a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.