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.