A deadly epidemic threatens Los Angeles - and the entire world - if the illness isn't contained immediately. That's the issue at the core of this compelling novel.
*****It's early December 2012, and a number of doomsday cults believe the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world on December 21, 2012.
Aware that this means Mayan artifacts will garner exceptionally high prices, an indigenous Guatemalan man steals an ancient Codex from a 'lost' Mayan temple and brings it to Los Angeles, to sell to a relics broker.
For safekeeping, the relics broker brings the purloined Codex to Chel Manu, the Antiquities Curator of the Getty Museum.
Chel knows it's wrong - and illegal - to harbor the Codex, but she can't help herself. Chel is an indigenous Guatemalan, she can speak and read Quiché (the Mayan language), and reading the Codex is almost a religious experience for her. Moreover, the Codex seems to tell a story about the village of Chel's forebears.
Meanwhile, the Mayan man who pilfered the Codex winds up in a hospital, suffering from Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), a prion disease. (Prions are misshapen proteins in the brain.) Prion diseases are notoriously contagious, usually spread by eating infected animals, as happened with Mad Cow Disease.
Dr. Gabe Stanton, a prion expert with the Centers For Disease Control, confirms the Mayan patient has FFI, but can't understand the man's Quiché rantings.
So Chel Manu is engaged as an interpreter, and - to make a long story short - Stanton and Manu figure out the patient 'caught' the prion illness at the temple he looted.
Prion diseases are always fatal, and the Mayan man dies a horrible death. People who came in contact with the patient also get sick and die, and FFI threatens to speed through Los Angeles and spread to the world.
Thus Los Angeles is put on lockdown (can you imagine?) and Stanton and his team of researchers hurry to find a treatment for FFI. None of this will do much good, however, unless the source of the disease, in the jungles of Guatemala, is found.
Chel gets in trouble for having the Codex, but is given a reprieve to translate the document. Reading the Codex might help to determine the EXACT location of the temple that harbored it. When clues to the temple's location surface, a delegation goes to Guatemala to search, but it's a difficult and dangerous enterprise.
In the meantime, FFI is killing its victims; people are trying to sneak out of Los Angeles; there's rioting and looting all over the city; a doomsday cult plans to leave civilization and establish a community in the jungle; and more.
The Codex is difficult to translate because it contains glyphs and glyph combinations Chel isn't familiar with. So Chel gets assistance, and a fascinating Mayan story slowly emerges. For example, the Mayan village in the tale is suffering from a years-long-drought, and there are no trees, no food, no anything to sustain life; a high-ranking Mayan man dies, and his wife is expected to commit suicide; an influential Mayan man takes two children as wives, to protect them from a predatory dwarf; Mayan leaders are engaging in cannibalism; and more. (I listened to the audiobook of the novel, and the Mayan tale is rendered in the 'voice' of a Mayan man, which adds to the story's atmosphere.)
Can Stanton and his crew find a way to contain FFI? You'll have to read the book to find out.
Author Dustin Thomasen, who studied anthropology and has an M.D. degree, is clearly knowledgeable about diseases and medicine, as well as Mayan culture and language. I like stories about deadly epidemics, and this is a good one. Highly recommended.
Rating: 4 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment