Vitals

Description

Scientist Hal Cousins is close to discovering the key to immortality but someone has already found it and will kill him to keep it secret. Vitals is a tense technothriller in the best Michael Crichton tradition. A mile and a half below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, scientist Hal Cousins, frightened of the dark and no friend of God, is looking for the fountain of youth. The Nobel Prize doesn't interest him. Hal is in longevity research for the long haul, the really long haul. 'Angels' (rich businessmen keen to live a thousand years) fund him. Hal finds what he is searching for: xenos, the single-celled tramps of the sea floor, each one as big as a clenched fist. But then the pilot of his sub goes berserk. Hal barely survives; the xenos don't. The pilot kills himself. Five other scientists in related fields die violently in the space of a week. Hal discovers a trail of death stretching back over decades, from Stalin's Russia to present-day Manhattan. Another epidemic of murder by superbly trained killers has been triggered by what Hal nearly discovered...From the bottom of Russia's Lake Baikal to a billionaire's bionic house built into the cliffs of the Californian seashore, from the darkest days of the reign of Joseph Stalin in Russia to the capitalist free-for-all of modern America, the edge of immortality is the most dangerous place to be.

Greg Bear was born in 1951 and published his first short story sixteen years later. His first novel was published in 1979, and his most famous novels, Blood Music and Eon, emerged during the eighties and have now become established classics.

'Greg Bear has written an excellent thriller and one that easily ranks alongside Marathon Man or The Odessa File ... From start to finish this startling science thriller trying to guess ...an enjoyable and extremely readable thriller' Enigma 'A chilling air of highly infectious paranoia ... alarmingly proficient cross-genre thriller makes The X-Files feel curiously tame and is surely destined for cult success' Starburst 'Brilliantly playing on our fears about government conspiracies, Bear's remarkable thriller combines extremely authoritative scholarship with impressive page-turning skills' Starlog 'Whatever Bear touches turns epic ... rarely have I felt so much the presence of great events' THE TIMES 'Darwin's Radio is a tense technothriller in the Michael Crichton vein ... But it's got a disturbing twist ... profoundly unsettling.' NEW SCIENTIST 'Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio is one of the most intelligent and original thrillers of recent years ... a suspense novel that pushes a lot of contemporary buttons ... this season's most convincing candidate for a bestselling thriller ... As with his other books, the special pleasures of Bear's writing come from its interaction of Big Ideas with more down-to-earth human issues ... Bear is one of a handful of writers in the field who manage both the complexity of the intellectual material and the solidity and depth of feeling required for a 'novel of ideas' to be a real novel.' LOCUS 'Greg Bear builds a neat conspiracy, back-tracking the entire 20th century as he ties politics, war and atrocity into humanity's next upgrade. Real page-turning stuff' SFX