Trudeau Vector — Juris Jurjevics
Viking Adult
2005
Rating:


On the Canadian island of Trudeau in the Arctic, four scientists go missing from their Arctic Research Station and are later found dead with their pupils and irises missing, their lungs paralyzed, and their bodies are oddly contorted. The Los Angeles-based Infectious Diseases Center sends Jessie Hanley to Trudeau to investigate the disease that killed the scientists and, due to the weather conditions, will be trapped there for five months. Meanwhile, Russian submarine Admiral Georgi Rudenko is to retrieve the distressed sub the Vladivostok. When he arrives, the crew of the sub has suffered the same fate as the scientists at Trudeau. Hanley and Rudenko's findings collide to reveal a dangerous, algae-based biological weapon being developed with Cold War connections.

A scientist at the Infectious Diseases Center says, "It's sort of all or nothing in our line of work. Until you've got something, you've often got nothing." For most of its 416 pages, Hanley has nothing and the story suffers for it. When the story doesn't read like "The Annals of Epidemiology," it offers science lessons on the indigenous peoples, wildlife, and microbiological specimens of the Arctic. With the disease apparently contained, the stakes aren't raised and there's no urgency to find the mysterious vector.

Most of the plot features the characters realizing things the audience figured out a long time ago: this disease is unlike anything scientists have ever seen before, and the missing Russian sub hasn't contacted Moscow because all of the passengers have died from the virus. Once the mysterious algae is introduced, it becomes clear to everyone except Hanley that this must be the source of the vector. The Russian involvement seems irrelevant until the out-of-nowhere climax.

The threat of a disease outbreak should be harrowing and the Arctic setting should increase the sense of danger, but this story is content to devote itself entirely to science without creating an entertaining fiction.

Posted Thursday, October 6, 2005

Link to this review:
http://filmzeus.pressbin.com/book//trudeau.vector