The Proteus Vector by Michael Clark

The Proteus Vector Reviews

• 
  Robert Beveridge

  Michael Clark, The Proteus Vector (Pinnacle, 1991)
  
  Amusing and well-plotted, if amateur, medical thriller about a lovely young lass who goes around killing people in inventive, insect-borne ways and the systematic entomologist who has to find and stop her. There have been a lot of amateur detectives in various professions over the years, from cooks to librarians, but a systematic entomologist? That's new. And in a book that's eighteen years old as I write this. Gotta love innovation.
  
  The plot is slow to get started, but the book itself starts off with a bang: an unassuming druggist from Washington, DC, is murdered by his girlfriend in a way that I'm sure no reader would be unmoved by: after drugging him, she exposes him to tsetse flies, infecting him with sleeping sickness. The first, roughly, quarter of the book takes us through this procedure, after which we head for Chicago, and then Sacramento, where some other folks die of the kinds of diseases most American's didn't start hearing about until The X-Files. Once we get to Sacramento, we meet our hero Neville Abbott, the systematic entomologist, and his sidekick Anita Meredith, recent PhD looking for work in Sacramento while assisting her mentor. Abbott also has an ex-girlfriend named Bev who also does bugs. The three of them, in various configurations, do some digging, confront suspects, and all that sort of thing.
  
  Michael Clark, it has been hypothesized in a number of places, may actually be a nom de plume for a much more famous medical-thriller writer whose first name is Michael and whose last name also begins with C. I haven't read too many of the esteemed Mr. Crichton's books, so I'm certainly not the best judge of this, but I have to say that I found the science here a lot less dry and boring than in Crichton's books, while the writing was a lot less polished (one of my favorite examples, from the last paragraphs of chapter twenty: “Anita could almost “see” his mind working.”). The one thing Clark does passing well, however, is plot; this is a whodunit that will have you wondering right up until Clark tells you who actually dunit. He does follow this up with one of those annoying “howidunit” sections, but the fact that he kept me guessing the whole way, and his fine use of red herrings, probably made me look a bit more kindly on that than I otherwise would have. It's been out of print for quite a while now, but it's worth hunting down. ***