FIRST HORSEMAN /MOVIE/Random House/PB

The ideal destructive plague is one which is passed on before it kills, one which is in the air we breathe and the fevered skin we touch. John Case drops heavy hints to the well-informed as to what is at stake in his new techno- thriller early on, when the sole survivor of a North Korean village sterilised by its own government's bombers babbles uncomprehendingly about a "Spanish Lady". He confirms them by sending a party of American scientists to excavate a group of miners caught in permafrost since 1918; bodies which prove, scarily, to be long gone with only a painted white horse in their place. A woman bacteriologist and an overbearing science journalist put together bits of the story that their government is scared of anyone knowing. Members of a pseudo-scientific cult carry out terrible murders--frying the over-curious in a giant microwave--for what they regard as the long-term good of the planet.