2008 books

[peteryoung]

65) Nancy Kress, Dogs, 2008
A straightforward thriller about a canine plague that arrives in Maryland from Africa, but with aspects that alert the FBI's suspicions about this being a work of domestic terrorism. Dogs hits the ground running with some rather good, user-friendly characterisation, even if perhaps the actual roles of those characters are delineated along fairly standard lines. What Kress does do particularly well is to show how a bigger and more irrational danger than infected dogs are the people with an agenda who are caught up in the situation, whether they be dog lovers or haters. It's a decent page-turner, undoubtedly, but I have two minor complaints: 1) I do wish authors (note the plural) would first run it past someone who actually knows when they put their characters on international flights, and 2) Dogs would have been rendered considerably more cliché-free without several unnecessary variations of "somewhere in the distance, a dog barked", but when it's a book actually about dogs it probably ought to be expected and the cliché forgiven. Thanks for the free book, Nancy, I enjoyed it.