Vial Murders: A Doctor Samantha Turner Mystery (Walker Mystery) - Hardcover

Landreth, Marsha

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802731996 ISBN 13: 9780802731999

Publisher: Walker & Co, 1994

Synopsis

Dr. Samantha Turner is back in Wyoming, believing that her life is resuming normalcy, until the corpse she examines reveals death through smallpox and she must discover who has unleashed the remaining, once frozen virus before it turns into another plague.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

Smallpox has been extinct--the only species ever deliberately exterminated by humankind--since 1977. So why has it suddenly turned up in Sheridan, Wyo.? Bull-headed county coroner Dr. Samantha Turner (A Clinic for Murder, 1993, etc.) is hot on the trail of the infection that killed David Crider, just returned from a student leadership conference in Washington, D.C., when she's felled herself, apparently by a treacherous hantavirus that's running rampant among everybody who treated David. Sam spends ten days in the hospital, emerging weak, shaken, and frustratingly amnesiac. Why would anybody deliberately let loose smallpox among a bunch of high-school kids? What does the real threat of a new smallpox epidemic have to do with the bogus epidemic of hantavirus? How are Sam's husband, Derek, and his CIA bosses involved? What's happened to David's best friend, Jess Gorzalka, who's practically certain to be infected with smallpox, and to Sam's father, an Alzheimer's patient vanished from his nursing home? And how can Sam keep the outbreak secret when new cases are threatened every day that brings Sheridan's college rodeo closer? Landreth has no serious rivals in the niche of intense, low- calorie (cf. Robin Cook's double-scoop, high-cholesterol thrillers) medical-ethics whodunits. Here it's hard to tell who's more diabolical, the killers or the feds. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

A timely premise-the reemergence of smallpox-is ill-served by the abrasive sleuthing of Sheridan, Wyo., medical examiner Samantha Turner in her third appearance, following A Clinic for Murder. When a teenage boy dies after attending a conference with students from all over the world, Sam notes textbooks signs of smallpox, a disease wiped out in 1977, save for a few locked-up racks of frozen lab vials. The boy's body disappears, as does a second youngster, while Sam jousts with disbelieving representatives from the Center for Disease Control, the local police chief, who regularly (and legally) tows her car, and a paralyzing bout of her own with a deadly virus. In a less than creditable subplot, her husband Derek, a CIA operative who is the son of her previous husband, endangers Sam's ill father by bringing him to the ominous genetics research lab where her previous case was set. Landreth raises chilling elements of medical ethics here, but suspense and excitement don't go the distance as an unlikely tag team of townsfolk steps in to take care of the bad guys.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Walker & Co
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0802731996
• ISBN 13: 9780802731999
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 250