Dr. Lyle Martin was a revered professor, a charismatic speaker, whose professional and personal life unraveled. He drinks too much, he suffers from insomnia and self-medicates, his wife left him, and he lost his teaching post. When he is invited to speak at a conference on infectious diseases in tiny Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a glimmer of hope surfaces. Soon after landing, Lyle, still in a daze from his sleeping pills, is awakened by a flight attendant and asked to come to the flight deck. At first glance, every passenger save one seems dead, but they are in fact catatonic, as is everybody at the airport, he later discovers. Lyle, the pilot Captain Eleanor Hall and her co-pilot Jerry Weathers, along with the passenger, set off to get help and try to establish some communication, as nothing seems to work. If it's a virus, it is unlike anything Lyle has ever seen. How far does it extend?

DEAD ON ARRIVAL is so intense, so ingenious, and so chilling with realistic speculation, it is one of the most difficult books I have ever had to review, not to mention the innumerable spoilers I could inadvertently reveal. The characters are extremely well fleshed-out, which is often lacking in this type of story. Mr. Richtel's research is exemplary, equally impressive for the medical side as to the technological one, and it is so captivating that I hope I haven't warped my reader by gripping it so hard at times. When I read novels such as DEAD ON ARRIVAL, I always make a point of paying very close attention to the clues I am fed; I had an inkling as to where the story was leading, and that's when the author threw in some astounding twists that left me as confounded as some characters. I also very much appreciated the little wink to a Philip K. Dick classic. When I thought all the pieces of the puzzle were about to fall in together, it all exploded and this mind-blowing story got even better.

There are many characters involved in the several sub-plots which converge towards the same point, and the least I can say is that Matt Richtel has everything under control. The writing is tight, smooth, efficient, the whole book has a very cinematic feel and there are interesting observations on the technological world we inhabit from several points of view that will have readers thinking for a good while after the last page is turned.

Book Summary

FLIGHT 194 LANDED.

SOMETHING LETHAL AWAITS OUTSIDE.

THIS IS DEAD ON ARRIVAL.

An airplane touches down at a desolate airport in a remote Colorado ski town. Shortly after landing, Dr. Lyle Martin, a world-class infectious disease specialist, is brusquely awakened to shocking news: Everyone not on the plane appears to be dead. The world has gone dark. While they were in the air, a lethal new kind of virus surfaced, threatening mankind's survival, and now Martin—one of the most sought-after virologists on the planet until his career took a precipitous slide—is at the center of the investigation.

Moving at lightning pace from the snowbound Rockies to the secret campus of Google X, where unlimited budgets may be producing wonders beyond our capacity to control, Dead on Arrival is a brilliantly imaginative, intricately plotted thriller that draws on Matt Richtel's years of science and technology reporting for the New York Times, and establishes him as one of the premier thriller writers working today.