Dr. Lyle Martin was a revered professor, a charismatic speaker,
whose professional and personal life unraveled. He drinks too
much, he suffers from insomnia and self-medicates, his wife
left him, and he lost his teaching post. When he is invited to
speak at a conference on infectious diseases in tiny Steamboat
Springs, Colorado, a glimmer of hope surfaces. Soon after
landing, Lyle, still in a daze from his sleeping pills, is
awakened by a flight attendant and asked to come to the flight
deck. At first glance, every passenger save one seems dead, but
they are in fact catatonic, as is everybody at the airport, he
later discovers. Lyle, the pilot Captain Eleanor Hall and her
co-pilot Jerry Weathers, along with the passenger, set off to
get help and try to establish some communication, as nothing
seems to work. If it's a virus, it is unlike anything Lyle has
ever seen. How far does it extend?
DEAD ON ARRIVAL is so intense, so ingenious, and so chilling
with realistic speculation, it is one of the most difficult
books I have ever had to review, not to mention the innumerable
spoilers I could inadvertently reveal. The characters are
extremely well fleshed-out, which is often lacking in this type
of story. Mr. Richtel's research is exemplary, equally
impressive for the medical side as to the technological one,
and it is so captivating that I hope I haven't warped my
reader
by gripping it so hard at times. When I read novels such as
DEAD ON ARRIVAL, I always make a point of paying very close
attention to the clues I am fed; I had an inkling as to where
the story was leading, and that's when the author threw in
some
astounding twists that left me as confounded as some
characters. I also very much appreciated the little wink to a
Philip K. Dick classic. When I thought all the pieces of the
puzzle were about to fall in together, it all exploded and this
mind-blowing story got even better.
There are many characters involved in the several sub-plots
which converge towards the same point, and the least I can say
is that Matt Richtel has everything under control. The writing
is tight, smooth, efficient, the whole book has a very
cinematic feel and there are interesting observations on the
technological world we inhabit from several points of view that
will have readers thinking for a good while after the last page
is turned.
An airplane touches down at a desolate airport in a remote
Colorado ski town. Shortly after landing, Dr. Lyle Martin, a
world-class infectious disease specialist, is brusquely
awakened to shocking news: Everyone not on the plane appears
to be dead. The world has gone dark. While they were in the
air, a lethal new kind of virus surfaced, threatening
mankind's survival, and now Martin—one of the most
sought-after virologists on the planet until his career took
a precipitous slide—is at the center of the investigation.
Moving at lightning pace from the snowbound Rockies to the
secret campus of Google X, where unlimited budgets may be
producing wonders beyond our capacity to control, Dead on
Arrival is a brilliantly imaginative, intricately plotted
thriller that draws on Matt Richtel's years of science and
technology reporting for the New York Times, and establishes
him as one of the premier thriller writers working today.
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