Matt’s Reviews: The Genius Plague by David Walton

• Publisher:               PYR
• Publication date:  10/03/2017
• Pages:                     384
• ISBN13:                  9781633883437
• ISBN10:                 1633883434
• Author:                  David Walton

The Genius Plague by David Walton is a fun sci-fi thriller.  A mycology researcher (someone who studies fungus) comes out of the Amazon rain forest just in time for his boat and everyone on it to be attacked by a military or pseudo-military group.  He and another woman are the only ones to survive, but both end up contracting a fungal infection.  He survives, but she does not.  He returns to the US about the same time as his younger brother starts a job with the NSA.  When he recovers from the worst of the infection, he is actually smarter than he has ever been before with complete recall.  The fungus has worked its way throughout his body and brain.  This is the beginning of the tale that leads through political assassinations, wars throughout South America, and armies of infected geniuses with their own agenda.  

It is a fun page turner with several twists and turns.   I enjoyed the code-breaking protagonist and his team mates.  It went a little over the top from time to time, but was mostly inline with the universe Walton created.  One interesting part was the conflicting themes of an infection that allowed humanity to work together and to help the environment while, at the same time, it threatens humans and maybe even humanity.  The combination of the positive and negative aspects of the ‘plague’ made it a more intriguing story.  

I really liked this book.  I can’t say it was a ‘great’ book, but it is a very good book.   If the description above sounds interesting to you, you will probably really like this story.  If you don’t like this type of genre, it’s not going make you like it, but it is a very good story of the genre.

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by Matt Truxaw