So he ends up, time and again, just braking the story, stopping it cold, to present long, finger-pointing essays about the ”invisible history” of worldwide biological-weapons development. Although Preston sets up his plot with uncluttered efficiency, he never manages to find a smooth way to integrate factual material (and he has plenty of it, all depressing) into his narrative. Apparently, there’s yet another serial killer on the loose - this one using ”black biology” as his murder weapon. When two other identical fatalities - a homeless man and an antiques dealer - are reported, Austen turns medical sleuth, cleverly tracing the source of the infection to a couple of wooden novelty boxes, each containing a toy cobra that jumps out, spraying a little puff of contaminated dust at the touch of a spring mechanism. The autopsy (grisly-scene alert: Patricia Cornwell’s morgues seem tame by comparison) reveals that the dead girl’s central nervous system was ravaged, and her brain turned into a ”glassy pudding,” by some unknown but fast-replicating virus.

Alice Austen, a public-health officer with the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, is sent to investigate. After a New York City high school student - suffering from nothing more than a mild head cold, presumably - goes into violent convulsions and dies, Dr. The Cobra Event is a dramatic, heart-stopping account of a very real threat, told with the skill and authority that made Prestons The Hot Zone an internationally acclaimed bestseller. His very first novel, The Cobra Event, about an act of bioterrorism within New York City, was about to spawn a sequence of events that would eventually lead to policy changes at the federal level in America.

The cobra event book