Chelsea Quinn Yarbro: Taji’s Syndrome
Jun. 28th, 2018 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bibliogrammaChelsea Quinn Yarbro is perhaps best known for her remarkable series of historical supernatural novels featuring the vampire Count Saint Germain, but she’s also written a wide range of other novels in a variety of genres. Taji’s Syndrome is a solid near-future medical thriller about a freak accident in a militarily funded genetic research lab that has cascading consequences that only appear years afterwards.
The reader has all the important clues up front - Yarbro begins with the incident, and the series of co-incidental events that lead to the fetuses carried by six pregnant woman at a particular point in the pregnancies being affected. But from that point, the reader, like the medical researchers across the country some 15 years later, is caught up in the history of a bewildering epidemic. At first, it’s only a few cases in clusters, and for the isolated doctors and researchers, looks like a classic case of toxic contamination. But the epidemic spreads out from those loci like an infectious disease, and by the time the Centers for Disease Control are called in, thousands are dying from a disease no one understands.
I happen to quite enjoy this kind of medical thriller, and so for me this was a great read - suspenseful, conveying both the urgency and the frustration of medical detectives struggling to put the pieces together while people are dying all around them and each day without a solution to the puzzle and a step towards a viable cure is a day where their whole raison d’etre as doctors is chalkenged.
The reader has all the important clues up front - Yarbro begins with the incident, and the series of co-incidental events that lead to the fetuses carried by six pregnant woman at a particular point in the pregnancies being affected. But from that point, the reader, like the medical researchers across the country some 15 years later, is caught up in the history of a bewildering epidemic. At first, it’s only a few cases in clusters, and for the isolated doctors and researchers, looks like a classic case of toxic contamination. But the epidemic spreads out from those loci like an infectious disease, and by the time the Centers for Disease Control are called in, thousands are dying from a disease no one understands.
I happen to quite enjoy this kind of medical thriller, and so for me this was a great read - suspenseful, conveying both the urgency and the frustration of medical detectives struggling to put the pieces together while people are dying all around them and each day without a solution to the puzzle and a step towards a viable cure is a day where their whole raison d’etre as doctors is chalkenged.