In the Book of Revelations, the Four Horsemen herald the arrival of the Apocalypse. When the First Horseman thunders forth, pestilence will spread throughout the land. For the First Horseman is Plague. . . . With the highly acclaimed New York Times bestseller The Genesis Code, John Case gave us a compelling, chillingly plausible novel of suspense that readers devoured in one sitting. Now Case once again combines cutting-edge science with political intrigue in a thriller even more terrifying--a journey into a nightmare so frighteningly believable that it might just happen tomorrow. The Spanish Flu killed forty million people worldwide in 1918. Now, with history threatening to repeat itself, a scientific expedition speeds toward a remote island in the Arctic Sea to recover strains of the lethal virus preserved under layers of ice. For Washington Post reporter Frank Daly, it is the story of a lifetime. But his plan to join the expedition is ruined by a ferocious storm that delays him. And when he meets up with the ship upon its return to port in Norway, it is clear that something has gone terribly wrong. Fear haunts the faces of the crew. No one will talk. And someone wants Daly to stop asking questions. But if there's a wall around the facts, Daly will batter it down. Persistent and resourceful, he knows how to get answers when none are given. Yet the more he uncovers, the more dangerous the stakes become. Until at last he comes face-to-face with a shocking secret, pitching him into a harrowing race to prevent nothing less than . . . apocalypse. Gripping, heartpounding, The First Horseman hurtles through jolting twists of plot to reveal an enemy as ominous as the darkest prophecy. A knockout thriller, here is a novel of unrelenting suspense you will find hard to put down--and even harder to forget. The fictional bioterror of Richard Preston's The Cobra Event was scary enough, but The First Horseman is based on the real Spanish flu, a hideous virus that killed over 20 million people in 1918. From the opening pages, this second novel by investigative reporter John Case (author of The Genesis Code ) thrusts readers into the thick of a rapid-fire plot. In New York, a man and a woman are murdered at their home by a cult whose motivations remain mysterious. Immediately, the action shifts to Tasi-ko, North Korea, where a medical worker flees to the mountains to escape a disease that has decimated his village. While he looks on from his hiding spot, North Korean soldiers pour into Tasi-ko and incinerate it and all of its suffering inhabitants. The CIA investigates the events at Tasi-ko, and realizing that the disease could well be a hybrid Spanish flu being tested as a biological weapon, recruits a team of American scientists to uncover the only known sample of the 1918 pandemic--which is frozen into the bodies of miners buried in the Arctic. From there the novel traces scientists Anne Adair and Benton Kicklighter on their expedition to the frozen town of Kopervik to uncover the miners' corpses. Not knowing that the CIA is behind Adair and Kicklighter's work, Washington Post reporter Frank Daly follows their story. When the scientists return empty-handed, though, he begins to suspect that a medical curiosity is on the verge of becoming a global catastrophe. The strength of the novel is the eerie suspense that Case sustains by revealing only enough about the Korean plot and the Temple of Light cult to keep the reader fully engaged and wanting more. While Case doesn't spend much time delving into the lives and motivations of his characters, the Spanish flu is the real star. Case propels the novel with the constant reminder that a new plague is on the verge of exploding, and his several enigmatic subplots keep you turning the pages and praying that this is only fiction. --Patrick O'Kelley From the author of The Genesis Code (LJ 3/1/97) comes another page-turning scientific thriller. Frank Daly, an investigative reporter pursuing a story about influenza, has been invited to join a scientific team bound for the Arctic in order to take tissue samples from miners who died during the 1918 pandemic. A storm makes Daly miss the launch, stranding him in Russia, and when the scientists reach their site, they are met by the FBI and find that the bodies they expected to examine are gone. With vividly alive characters and intricate plotting, the story moves swiftly toward a somewhat subdued conclusion. The "first horseman" of the title is the villain Solange, leader of a cult called the Temple of Light. The cult aims to begin the Apocalypse by cultivating and spreading a deadly flu virus; cult members will be spared by virtue of a closely guarded vaccine. Unnerving and compelling, this will leave readers wondering for years to come about the next flu outbreak. Highly recommended.?Shirley Gibson Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. "Gripping . . . [A] tense thriller." --Pu