The First Horseman

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The fictional bioterror of Richard Preston's The Cobra Event was scary enough, but The First Horseman is based on the real Spanish flu, a hideous virus that killed over 20 million people in 1918. From the opening pages, this second novel by investigative reporter John Case (author of The Genesis Code) thrusts readers into the thick of a rapid-fire plot. In New York, a man and a woman are murdered at their home by a cult whose motivations remain mysterious. Immediately, the action shifts to Tasi-ko, North Korea, where a medical worker flees to the mountains to escape a disease that has decimated his village. While he looks on from his hiding spot, North Korean soldiers pour into Tasi-ko and incinerate it and all of its suffering inhabitants. The CIA investigates the events at Tasi-ko, and realizing that the disease could well be a hybrid Spanish flu being tested as a biological weapon, recruits a team of American scientists to uncover the only known sample of the 1918 pandemic--which is frozen into the bodies of miners buried in the Arctic. From there the novel traces scientists Anne Adair and Benton Kicklighter on their expedition to the frozen town of Kopervik to uncover the miners' corpses. Not knowing that the CIA is behind Adair and Kicklighter's work, Washington Post reporter Frank Daly follows their story. When the scientists return empty-handed, though, he begins to suspect that a medical curiosity is on the verge of becoming a global catastrophe.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In New York's Hudson Valley, a man and a woman are brutally murdered by strangers ... in North Korea, a village decimated by disease is bombed to rubble ... and on the Norwegian sea, an icebreaker forges its way through frozen waters to a remote island in the Arctic, carrying a scientific team that hopes to unearth the bodies of long-dead miners. Three separate events - all linked in an intricate web of hidden plots and counterplots. Washington Post reporter Frank Daly has the story of a lifetime. But his plans to join the scientists on their historic mission is ruined by a ferocious storm that delays him. When he meets up with the ship upon its return to port in Norway, it is clear that something has gone terribly wrong. Fear haunts the faces of the crew. No one will talk. And someone wants Daly to stop asking questions.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Recent reports that the 1918 flu virus, source of history's most lethal pandemic, might be preserved inside the bodies of five Norwegian miners buried beneath the permafrost on the remote Arctic island of Spitsbergen make this novel especially timely. Moving in dated chapters through the spring into the summer months of 1998, this tense thriller turns that story into a "secular apocalypse," which begins when a North Korean medical officer flees across the DMZ to report that his isolated village was first devastated by a strange sickness, then destroyed and completely buried by the military. A team of American microbiologists, whose application to exhume the Spitsbergen bodies has been denied, suddenly finds its expedition funded by a foundation from which they hadn't even sought money. Frank Daly, a Washington Post reporter scheduled to join the expedition, is grounded in Archangel, and when he meets the icebreaker Rex Mundi on its return to Norway, he finds the pier closed and no one from the expedition willing to talk to him--a sure incentive for any true reporter to pursue the story to the death, which Daly very nearly does. Although the setup is in some ways more gripping than the action payoff of the novel's second half, pseudonymous D.C. reporter Case (The Gemini Code) breathes excitement into his topical story. Especially memorable is the microwave death of one character, leaving behind just a tiny handful of soot. (Aug.)

Library Journal

From the author of The Genesis Code (LJ 3/1/97) comes another page-turning scientific thriller. Frank Daly, an investigative reporter pursuing a story about influenza, has been invited to join a scientific team bound for the Arctic in order to take tissue samples from miners who died during the 1918 pandemic. A storm makes Daly miss the launch, stranding him in Russia, and when the scientists reach their site, they are met by the FBI and find that the bodies they expected to examine are gone. With vividly alive characters and intricate plotting, the story moves swiftly toward a somewhat subdued conclusion. The "first horseman" of the title is the villain Solange, leader of a cult called the Temple of Light. The cult aims to begin the Apocalypse by cultivating and spreading a deadly flu virus; cult members will be spared by virtue of a closely guarded vaccine. Unnerving and compelling, this will leave readers wondering for years to come about the next flu outbreak. Highly recommended.--Shirley Gibson Coleman, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI

AudioFile

The First Horseman is about our current terrorist nightmare, the unleashing of an unstoppable disease, in this case the Spanish flu. An environmental group will do everything in its power to prevent scientists and government spooks from stopping it. Dick Hill delivers this novel with subtle characterizations and fluid narration, relating all the mental tribulations of journalist Frank Daley's pursuit of the story. Hill's steady performance and cadence disappear into the narration, capturing the terror of the intrigue and bringing the personalities to the fore. Between Case, Hill, and the convoluted plot, the action never stops. M.B.K. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

Superchilling tale of the Spanish Flu's revival (which killed 20 to 30 million people in 1918)from the pseudonymous Case (the well-received biotech thriller The Genesis Code, 1997). Word is received by the CIA that a quarter of the population of the North Korean village of Tasi-ko has died of this flu; the other villagers, it seems, were executed just to contain the epidemic. No vaccine exists. Instead of building bombs, have the psychopathic North Koreans boiled up a batch of superflu that's gotten out of hand? Since the planet seems threatened by a global pandemic, a US medical research team is dispatched to the Norwegian permafrost to dig up five Norwegian coal miners who died of that same flu strain in 1918 and were buried on Kopervik, a far island in the Arctic Sea, and whose frozen lungs may well still hold intact the deadly but fragile virus. A vast storm delays Washington Past reporter Frank Daly from joining the medical team before its return from the graves at Kopervik. When he does catch up, he finds that virologists Anne Adair (a genius) and Benton Kicklighter have returned empty-handed and under guard. Someone had already stolen the miners' bodies before the American team arrived, and the predecessor left behind a Picasso-esque fresco of a giant white horse. Does the horse have anything to do with Luc Solange, head of the Temple of Light, who as the First Horseman of the Apocalypse wants to do away with industrialization? Mind-blowing Arctic amazement and an unholy crew of fanatics combine lethally to destroy the reader's sleep, as do the really smart Frank and Annie. Far more realistic than Stephen King's superflu in The Stand.