“One of the year’s best thrillers” — BestThrillers.com
In the small town of Stevens Crossing, unexplained, terrifying domestic violence, murders, suicides, and road rage begin occurring. Whole families sleep poorly, and because insomnia seems to spread like an infection, Dr. Kris Jensen is asked to help the Health Department investigate.
Through interviews with affected families, local doctors, and the police, Kris learns that insomnia is often heralded by a peculiar rash, strongly suggesting an unknown virus disturbs sleep with deadly psychiatric consequences. Thousands of visitors to an imminent town festival will risk multi-state spread of infection but Kris’s warning about transmission of a virus is rejected by town officials and her insomnia virus concern is ridiculed by outside experts.
Stevens Crossing turns against Kris with threats on her life, but she carries on and identifies two early insomniacs who may have been infected from a ring-tailed lemur, possibly linked to a German neuropharmaceutical facility. As she works to gather more information, she encounters resistance at every turn.
Will Kris be able to discover the origin of the virus and determine how to stop it before it spreads nationwide?
Alex Lettau is the pen name of Ludwig Alexander Lettau M.D., an infectious disease specialist who currently lives and works in Charleston, South Carolina.
In practice for more than 30 years, he holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Early in his career, Dr. Lettau was a medical missionary in Malawi (one year), Nicaragua (2 months), and Papua New Guinea (3 months). For two years he was a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control in the Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) assigned to the Viral Hepatitis Branch of the Division of Viral Diseases.
Dr. Lettau has published (as first author) 20 scientific articles in medical journals and also published 15 short medical humor pieces on such subjects as “O.J. Fever Syndrome,” “Hepatitis Z,” and “J.C. is History” (the funeral of Joe Camel) in Annals of Internal Medicine, Infectious Diseases in Clinical Practice, and Stitches, a Canadian medical humor journal.