In his new bio-thriller, “Child Zero,” Portland author Chris Holm envisions a pandemic even more dangerous than COVID-19.

In Holm’s harrowing future, disaster starts with an uptick in infectious disease around the globe: meningitis in Frankfurt, tuberculosis in New Delhi, cholera in Johannesburg. Not only do the outbreaks spread aggressively, they prove stronger than the antibiotic drugs of last resort. People start dying of injuries as formerly inconsequential as a paper cut.

To make matters worse, New York City is struck by an act of cold-blooded mass murder. A Canadian national named Spencer Brutsch finds a way to cultivate a multidrug-resistant strain of Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for bubonic, septicemia and pneumonic plague. He unleashes two aerosol canisters in jam-packed subway cars, and before long, thousands of people are dead, New York locked down and the city under martial law.

Four years later, New York Police Detective Jake Gibson has lost his wife in the 8/17 terrorist attack, which makes him an order of magnitude more protective of their four-year-old daughter Zoe. When she starts exhibiting severe flu-like symptoms, he’s on the verge of panic, afraid that one of their nosy neighbors will report them as disease carriers who should be taken away by the authorities. When he’s called in to investigate a shanty-town massacre in what used to be Central Park, he leaves his daughter in the care of his former girlfriend, Hannah, a thoracic surgeon.

From this point, Holm shifts the narrative into high gear and never lets up. Jake and his partner Amy visit the crime scene and rescue Mat, a 12-year-old immigrant on the run from some very dangerous men. Mat has been living among people who don’t seem to get sick, and no one knows why.

Holm is the author of six novels, most notably the hard-boiled Whitman sequence, “The Killing Kind” and “Red Right Hand.” He’s also trained as a microbiologist, and his professional expertise gives “Child Zero” an extra shot of verisimilitude, allowing him to imagine horrifying or pitiful details, such as a homeless person with leprosy – “his face a snarl of bulbous lesions, his hands reduced to twisted nubs, his teeth and gums eaten away…”

But Holm doesn’t let his research get in the way of his storytelling, packing each chapter with as much suspense as it can fit. Jake is a credible protagonist – vulnerable, highly competent, devoted to those he cares about. His relationships with the women in his life seem genuine, and Amy, Hannah and Zoe all have scenes that reveal their bravery and empathy.

The villains range from religious fanatics who wish to trigger an even more deadly plague to amoral mercenaries to buttoned-down corporate and government types. If the bad guys don’t feel as multifaceted as the good ones, blame it on the need to keep the narrative moving at top acceleration.

In an Author’s Note, Holm discusses “a topic at the beating heart of ‘Child Zero,’ namely the intersection of race and public health.” The note is well worth reading and remembering, as Holm pays respect to the likes of Henrietta Lacks and the Tuskegee syphilis patients. A bibliography offers suggestions for further reading.

Unlike many other post-apocalyptic novels, “Child Zero” offers a measure of hope. But we would be well to keep in mind the real-life lessons it presents. Unnecessary prescriptions and overuse of drugs for agriculture can be curtailed, at the same time that more research be invested in promising strategies such as probiotics, immunotherapy and phage therapy.

Taut and timely, “Child Zero” is a thriller with heat and heart.

Berkeley writer Michael Berry is a Portsmouth, New Hampshire, native who has contributed to Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, New Hampshire Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and many other publications. He can be contacted at:
mikeberry@mindspring.com
Twitter: mlberry

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