Kalla's fifth thriller is the second to feature Dr. Noah Haldane, an infectious-disease specialist working for the World Health Organization. In his first appearance, in Pandemic , Haldane faced a virulent new strain of bird flu. This new medical adventure takes him and his colleague, the crusty Scotsman Duncan McLeod, to rural France, where they encounter a puzzling outbreak of mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeld-Jacob disease. Along with the beautiful Elise Renard, envoy from the European Union's Agricultural Commission, the two men investigate the facts but discover a deeper mystery. Meanwhile, in Antarctica, a team of scientists has drilled down to a lake three miles below the earth's surface, and a Russian entrepreneur and her Dutch associate—two of the nastiest women you can imagine—are ready to exploit the commercial possibilities of this water that is free of any earthly pollution. How these two narrative lines intersect provides the drama and suspense in this well-written novel. Kalla, an emergency-room physician, employs just enough medical realism to carry a wild tale through one cliff-hanger chapter after another. Buy wherever this type of medical fiction is popular.—A.J. Wright, Anesthesiology Lib., Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham

In Kalla's meticulously detailed and carefully plotted new thriller, Dr. Claude Fontaine engineers a method to tap a huge, mysterious pool of fresh water two miles under the Antarctic ice without fear of contamination from our 21st-century toxins. His goal is to bottle this purest of waters and sell it for astronomical sums to health-seeking rich people everywhere. Meanwhile, infectious disease specialist Dr. Noah Haldane, hero of Kalla's Pandemic , along with his crusty, wisecracking Scottish sidekick, Duncan McLeod, travels to France to investigate seven cows that have tested positive for bovine spongiform encephalitis (aka mad cow disease). Several humans, the apparent victims of infected beef, have died horrible deaths. By the time the link between the Antarctic lake water and the mad cows becomes clear, many readers will find the journey too long and that in the end they don't really care that disaster has been narrowly averted and all those rich people have been saved. (Apr.)