The Patron Saint of Plagues: A Novel - Softcover

"Anderson has some serious writing chops, and he delivers a page turner that is at once a medical thriller, cyberpunk romp and provocative tease...a novel about race and class, science and faith."--Salon.com

"A cinematic, futuristic techno-thriller with smarts and heart...This cleverly managed skein of cliffhangers and revelations begs to be filmed."--San Diego Union-Tribune

"Very neat, impossible to put down, and I hope a book that gets nominated for some awards."--Philadelphia Weekly Press

"This is Barth Anderson's debut novel, and it's a stunner...A book of high verisimilitude and exacting precision. Anderson has taken the monitory example of John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, a Cassandra mode too long left moldering, and combined it with a typical bio-thriller such as Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain to produce a hybrid that is both scientifically and science-fictionally robust and still propulsively suspenseful."--Sci Fi Weekly, Grade A

"An exciting journey full of surprises."--Dallas Morning News

"The topic is timely (viruses and pandemics are hot), and the just-around-the-corner world is very well realized, full of smart extrapolations from today's technologies and social conventions."--Booklist

"Destined to find [a] highly appreciative audience...Anderson successfully joins with Greg Bear, Paul McAuley, and a few others in wedding genuinely SFnal speculation with the template of the formula thriller. There's a genuinely thoughtful SF mind at work in The Patron Saint of Plagues."--Locus

"A well-constructed, politically aware techno-thriller with an intriguing plot...when 'best first novel' lists get discussed next January this book will be one of the first suggested."--Emerald City

"Tense, plausible and twisty enough to keep you breathless and guessing."--Agony Column

"An apocalyptic prophesy masquerading as a near-future pandemic revenge thriller...riveting reading."--Strange Horizons

"A smart, entertaining, imminently readable book."--Maureen McHugh, author of Mothers & Other Monsters

"Barth Anderson's inventive viral emergency may be set in a speculative near future of saints and cyborgs, but it has a persuasive real-world urgency. He nails the gritty essence of disease detection: frustration, exhaustion, obsession."--Maryn McKenna, author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service

"The topic is timely (viruses and pandemics are hot), and the just-around-the-corner world is very well realized, full of smart extrapolations from today's technologies and social conventions."--Booklist

In a turbulent world of the near future, an outbreak of a deadly plague virus threatens to destroy precarious peace negotiations in Mexico, as well as the fate of the entire population of North and South America, as a team from the American Center for Disease Control, headed by Henry Stark, is smuggled over the dangerous U.S.-Mexico border to prevent a deadly worldwide epidemic. A first novel. Original. 25,000 first printing.