Omega

When his daughter becomes the latest patient to fall victim to a virulent strain of bacteria, Los Angeles surgeon Marcus Ford battles an indifferent health-care system for control of the antibiotic that could save her. Reprint.

This engrossing thriller probably isn't the book to read while suffering from a sore throat caused by a staph infection. "The cocci were perfect spheres, like eggs or dark spawn.... They clumped. And they doubled.... Doubling every twenty minutes and clumping together in grape-like clusters.... Clumped in clusters that numbered eight million and then sixteen million and then an hour later 128 million perfect peptidoglycan-plated spheres ..." Philip Sington and Gary Humphreys, who wrote Carriers under the Patrick Lynch pseudonym, combine news from recent headlines--flesh-eating bacteria, the increasing resistance of bugs to antibiotics--with an imaginative but plausible scenario of rampant infection, bureaucratic fumbling, and corporate greed. Even the minor characters are fully sketched, which is not always the case in scientific thrillers.