Pandemic: A Novel by Scott Sigler

Pandemic: A Novel by Scott Sigler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The explosive conclusion to the New York Times bestselling trilogy that began with Infected and Contagious.

The alien intelligence that unleashed two horrific assaults on humanity has been destroyed. But before it was brought down in flames, it launched one last payload-a tiny soda-can-sized canister filled with germs engineered to wreak new forms of havoc on the human race. That harmless-looking canister has languished under thousands of feet of water for years, undisturbed and impotent...until now.

Days after the new disease is unleashed, a quarter of the human race is infected. Entire countries have fallen. And our planet's fate now rests on a small group of unlikely heroes, racing to find a cure before the enemies surrounding them can close in.


I didn't read the first two books in this series but I had no problem following along. The infection returns and it has mutated. It has learned from past infections and this is the last batch. It crawls onto surfaces and cling when in human contact. It then burrows into the host until it finds the spinal cord and reacts with stem cells, completely changing the host from who they were to an alien life form that is murderous or becomes a nest for other alien life forms to form.

It's wild, gory, runs at a pace that keeps me up at night, and well thought out. The protagonists are not wonderful. I didn't really care what happened to them, perhaps because even those who stay human are traumatized enough to act in ways not completely civilized. Be prepared to stay up into the wee hours to find out the fate of the world.