Death by DNA

Please note that I’m following the blog’s recent trial policy of doing book reviews with no more than six sentences. The reviewers have kept reading and listening to books on tapes, but our style of review which in some cases was appropriate for the Sunday Times book review section (both NY and LA), became too burdensome and we’ve fallen way behind doing the reviews. So, for now, we’re going to try this abbreviated style. The point is that we’re trying to let one another know if a book is worth while to read, a thumbs up or thumbs down is the pithy message you may be looking for.

I’m not sure how I came by this book in my Kindle, Death by DNA by Pierce Roberts, but it has been a very worthwhile read. Tom O’Dell was a hard working large animal veterinarian in rural Wisconsin, and when there was an unexplained worldwide die off of big numbers of a variety of animals, he was drafted by the USDA to be a CDC trained field investigator. What if one of the Nazi scientists, a brilliant person with no consciousness for anything other than the master race, had escaped to the Amazon jungle where he had been doing research on both a way to kill without being detected and a way to extend his own life through the use of various plants? This is both a thriller and a love story. There are excellent characters who are well developed by the author. I enjoyed this one, so it gets a thumbs up.