A Book A Week

While I certainly wish I could be going to work and going about my life as normal, I do enjoy some of the perks of staying at home. At the start of the year, I resolved to work through a backlog of reviews from the year previous. Like most good-intentioned resolutions, this one quickly fell to the wayside. Lucky for me, I've been gifted a rare second chance to make good on that goal. I'm still maintaining my 2020 goal of reading and reviewing at least one book a week, but I now have a bit of extra time to devote to some of the books that I didn't get to feature in 2019. The first backlogged review couldn't be more timely.

In Cold Storage, author David Koepp writes of the attempted containment of a highly mutative organism that, if left unchecked, has the potential to take over the earth. This thing is nothing to mess with. The novel opens with a Pentagon official Roberto Diaz investigating what is believed to be some sort of bioterrorism attack. What he discovers is the thing nightmares are made of. No, this isn't a monster or an evil terrorist. In a world that is facing the realities of a novel virus, the threat of this little fungal organism seems even more devastating. One touch of this organism and you're done for. Diaz wastes no time containing the fungus and burying it deep in an underground Kansas facility.

Decades later, the front desk attendant at a self-storage facility notices the faint beeping of some kind of alarm. None of the controls within the facility point to anything out of the ordinary, but the alarm persists. Miles away, Roberto Diaz is called out of retirement to investigate an urgent matter that only he can address. Somehow the alarm that is alerting the US government and the minimal wage storage unit are one and the same. That deadly parasitic fungus has sat 300 feet below what has now become a storage facility, forgotten by time and the complicated web of government bureaucracy. After all these years something has changed. It will take the unlikely heroes of storage facility employees and long-retired government agents to stop what could potentially be the most catastrophic breach in human history.

David Koepp is probably best known for being the screenwriter for blockbuster films like Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, and Mission Impossible. It should come as no surprise then that Cold Storage is an action-packed novel that is easily read in one breathless sitting. There are obvious echos of the literary style of Michael Crichton, all very welcome in this case. I would argue that Koepp takes a bit more liberty for the sake of action and pace, leaving believability behind. Still, there's no denying this is a page-turner. Cold Storage doesn't have much in terms of character development. The protagonists all fall into neat little tropes that are serviceable to the story, but a bit predictable. In fact, some of the most convincing character work is actually for the parasitic fungus itself. There's one deliciously devilish description in particular written from the perspective of our fungal villain as it spreads into its unsuspecting victim. Overall, Cold Storage is a diversional "outbreak type" thriller that never truly rises beyond its inventive opening. This may be one case where a movie version penned by Koepp might be more successful.

For more information visit Amazon and Goodreads.
(2019, 37)