Fiction
Title: T-Rex Virus
Author: Tom Forest
Rating: Excellent!
Publisher: Stellar Books
Publisher’s E-mail: mediaguests@msn.com
Reviewed by: M.K.Turner

Douglas Odin probably wouldn’t have been such a bad guy had he lived anywhere else but in Seattle. He merely wished to be the richest man in the world and well–down the street was that guy who had invented Microsoft. He solved that problem by improvising on the great American tradition of simply moving further West, in this case to an area in the North Pacific Ocean some 400 miles off the coast of Washington where the sea floor rose close to the surface. As the author Tom Forest notes, Odin began a “literal nation building project,” developing the atoll into an island named Nord, establishing himself as Prince, and winning recognition at the U.N. (For directions on how to build your own island, see Chapter 7.)

Settling down pretty much to sinking his Pacific Rim shipping competition with a stealth sub, Odin continues to develop his professional commando-style army and fleet of Black Hawk helicopters while his oldest son, Thor, runs the family international pharmaceutical company. The island quickly gains popularity as an off shore banking and resort facility for wealthy friends. And then along comes this wonderful opportunity.

As our book opens, a young blond and beautiful paleontologist (is there any other kind?) at a dig-site in Utah unearths a complete skeleton of a tyrannosaurus rex and simultaneously comes upon a piece of meteorite. This rock crashed into the planet 65 million years ago and, upon impact in the oxygenated atmosphere, awakened a long-dormant enzyme which flowed out into the lake in which it was imbedded. The reader does not need to be told; obviously this enzyme was responsible for the extraterrestrial virus that annihilated the dinosaurs. And here it comes again.

One man’s dream of making billions (read Odin Pharmaceuticals) is another’s nightmare (read the President of the United States). As the disease spreads across the western states Thor Odin manages to steal the rock and attempts to transport it to Nord. Special Ops forces, led by FBI counterterrorism agent Dale Fox, spend 400 pages of non-stop action on land, in the air, but primarily at sea, attempting to regain it. And the scientific community, of course, goes bananas trying to figure out how to control the epidemic.

Forest has a very real knack for switching among the action sites so that the reader is constantly aware of what is going on in each camp, and the technology–the book is loaded with incredible military gadgets and scientific gismos–is never intrusive, always just what you wanted to know (even if you didn’t know you wanted to know it). The story line is tight, everything seems to be accounted for in the end, and the reader is delighted to know that there is another Dale Fox adventure in the works.