Because the war on drugs is not going well, the DEA initiates a secret project mixing a lethal Venezuelan hepatitis virus into heroin, rationalizing that a few deaths from a new type of hepatitis will deter drug abuse in many.

When Dr. Kris Jensen, a medical detective with the CDC’s Hepatitis Division, arrives in Mississippi to investigate rapidly fatal hepatitis in two drug users, she doesn’t expect to become a victim.

Two days after an accidental needlestick, she realizes that she is now infected with this unknown lethal virus and has only five days left to find answers to its origin. Jensen’s investigation takes her into the depths of a web of drug use and revenge murders, tracked by assassins who are determined to keep her from finding the truth.

The Best Medical Thrillers of the Decade (2010-2020)

Coming in 2026

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?