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It is history's most feared disease. It turned neighbor against neighbor, the civilized into the savage, and the living into the dead. Now, in a spellbinding novel of adventure and science, romance and terror, two eras are joined by a single trace of microscopic bacterium—the invisible seeds of a new bubonic plague.
In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France. There, he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death. . . .
Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London. In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries.
From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future, The Plague Tales is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction. For in 2005, humankind's last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past.
Praise for The Plague Tales
“Benson reveals a formidable talent as she blends historical fiction with a near-future bio-thriller.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Harrowing . . . Will give readers both nightmares and thrills . . . A carefully woven page-turner from which . . . Robin Cook and Michael Crichton could learn.”—Library Journal
“A hard-to-put-down thriller steeped in historical fiction and bio-tech sci-fi.”—Middlesex News (Mass.)
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Creators
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Series
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Publisher
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Release date
April 13, 2011 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307778116
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307778116
- File size: 3158 KB
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Languages
- English
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Levels
- ATOS Level: 7.9
- Lexile® Measure: 980
- Interest Level: 9-12(UG)
- Text Difficulty: 5-7
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Reviews
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Starred review from April 28, 1997
First-novelist Benson reveals a formidable talent as she blends historical fiction with a near-future bio-thriller. One strand of this novel loops through 14th-century Europe during the onslaught of the bubonic plague. The other runs through the year 2005, as the world is recovering from a global disaster called The Outbreaks. The latter tale features Janie Crowe, an American who has lost her entire family in the Outbreaks. A former surgeon, the 40-ish Crowe is forced by post-Outbreak legislation to "retrain" as a forensic archeology. While gathering soil samples in England, Crowe unwittingly unearths a piece of cloth that contains a bacterium that threatens the U.K. with a new strain of bubonic plague. The 14th-century tale, meanwhile, chronicles the journeys of Alejandro, a persecuted young Jewish physician whose banishment from his native Spain forces him to change his identity and eventually brings him to the court of England's King Edward. There he falls in love with the beautiful companion of the spoiled and capricious Princess Isabella, even as he searches for the cause and cure of the Black Death. Benson renders both eras and their characters in vivid detail and ties the two stories together with parallel plot elements and a unifying artifact--the young physician's notebook. While stronger as a historical than as a futuristic medical thriller, Benson's debut is assured and accomplished in both the past and the present.
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