A groundbreaking exploration of the human immune system—the key to our health and longevity—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and acclaimed author of A Deadly Wandering.A cancer patient risen from the grave. An HIV patient considered a medical marvel. Two "invisible" women suffering the frustration and pain of autoimmunity. Matt Richtel uses the stories of these four people to tell the incredible story of the human immune system. In this vivid narrative, Richtel builds on his acclaimed stories on immunotherapy in the New York Times, combining the latest science with interviews and engaging anecdotes from the world's leading researchers to reveal how the body marshals its forces to fight bacteria, viruses, parasites, and tumors. He also explains how, sometimes, this wondrous system that is our first line of defense can become a threat, attacking our organs and other systems. While modern life has freed us from many of the...

"MICHAEL CRICHTON meets STEPHEN KING at their finest ... with the creepiest opening I've ever read." — Lisa Gardner * "Joins the ranks of classic paranoid thrillers about human achievement run amok, with STEPHEN KING's The Stand and Michael Crichton's Terminal Man." — Joseph Finder * "A heart-stopping thriller. ... a must-read for MICHAEL CRICHTON fans." — Dallas Morning News * "Similar in atmosphere and style to MICHAEL CRICHTON and STEPHEN KING. ... A race-against-the-clock thriller." — BooklistFLIGHT 194 LANDED.SOMETHING LETHAL AWAITS OUTSIDE.THIS IS DEAD ON ARRIVAL.An airplane touches down at a desolate airport in a remote Colorado ski town. Shortly after landing, Dr. Lyle Martin, a world-class infectious disease specialist, is brusquely awakened to shocking news: Everyone not on the plane appears to be dead. The world has gone dark. While they were in the air, a lethal new kind of virus surfaced,...

It's Watergate. On servers.On the eve of the presidential election, a conspiracy threatens to alter the outcome of the vote—and the future of American politics. At the heart of the plot is a powerful computer program, aimed at rooting out hypocrisy among politicians to expose their truths . . . and ours. Left to unravel the conspiracy is a bitter, hotheaded former journalist, but he's just not sure he cares enough to get to the bottom of it.

Nat Idle, a San Francisco writer with a medical degree, narrowly survives an explosion in an Internet café after a stranger hands him a note warning him to exit immediately.The handwriting on the note belongs to his deceased girlfriend, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist whom he has obsessively been mourning. So begins HOOKED, a pop thriller for the Internet Age, written with the force of an adrenaline rush and the pace of an intimate email dispatch you can't stop reading. Each chapter of this novel will keep readers hooked as Nat Idle searches for the love of his life in the midst of manipulation and conspiracy.From Publishers WeeklyThis oddly flat thriller from first-time novelist Richtel opens with a warning in a dead girlfriend's handwriting, followed by an explosion in a San Francisco cafe. Nat Idle, who barely escapes, is perplexed by the note: his girlfriend Annie--from a very wealthy family involved in various opaque concerns--was swept off her sailboat four years ago and never seen again. Nat tracks down survivors of the blast, including waitress Erin Coultran, whose actions make Nat suspicious; when the home of aspiring novelist Simon Anderson, another survivor, catches on fire, Nat's suspicions intensify. Nat's investigations take him to Strawberry Labs, Annie's family company possibly named after Annie's childhood Labrador retriever. Despite intentionally short chapters à la The Da Vinci Code, Richtel (who writes the comic strip Rudy Park under nom de plume Theron Heir) has trouble bringing Nat to life or tension to the plot--in part because of Nat's first-person flashbacks to his relationship with Annie. Richtel's trying to do a brainy update of classic noir, but falls slightly short.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistNat Idle is a romantic. After finishing medical school, he abandons further training to become a freelance journalist; and he falls in love with Annie Kindle as soon as he hears her laugh. She is taken with his romanticism, even though her father, the alpha shark in Silicon Valley's venture capital sea, is grooming her to become his "smiling assassin." But Annie is lost in a sailing mishap, and four years later, Nat is still infatuated, still mourning. So, when a pretty woman leaves him a note in an Internet cafe, he follows her out the door--and escapes a lethal bomb blast. The note was written in Annie's distinctive hand. The scientist in Nat won't believe that Annie is still alive, but he begins to investigate the blast and finds himself immersed in Silicon Valley intrigue. Fully two-thirds of Hooked is a shrewd cinematic thriller, filled with knowing insights about San Francisco, Silicon Valley, and the wired-wireless world. But Richtel, a reporter for the New York Times, stumbles a bit as the story unfolds into an uberplot to turn us all into Internet addicts. Still, many readers will happily suspend disbelief and simply enjoy the yarn. Thomas GaughanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

We all keep secrets, but what if someone wasn't just stealing our secrets but changing them . . . and our brains?Journalist Nat Idle is nearly gunned down in Golden Gate Park. He quickly learns it was no random attack. Suddenly, in pursuit of the truth, he's running for his life through the shadows of Silicon Valley, a human lab animal caught in a deadly maze of neurotechnology and institutional paranoia. And his survival rests entirely in the hands of his eighty-five-year-old grandmother, Lane, who's suffering from dementia and can't remember the secret at the heart of the world-changing conspiracy.Author, technology reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner, Matt Richtel has dreamed up an exquisite nightmare firmly grounded in true science. The future is now,the possibilities endless . . . and positively terrifying.

A late-night accident on a San Francisco subway platform has altered Nat Idle's reality. But then, there are no accidents.Disoriented and bloodied after a near-deadly fall onto the subway tracks, freelance journalist Nat Idle discovers that a beautiful stranger has come to his aid . . . and that the burly man who barreled into him had intended to do Nat harm. What he doesn't know is why—and his quest for answers leads him to uncover a handful of mysterious deaths, and a bizarre neurological disorder plaguing Bay Area children . . . as he ventures ultimately into the Cloud.In a brave new world, the Cloud is where we store data, secrets, dreams. But it is something more—something insidious with the power to change not just how we interact with the world, but our behavior, and brains. Nat, in search of the truth, finds himself lost in a psychedelic maze, discovering things that cannot possibly be, realizing there is no one and nothing he can trust . . . not even his own mind. Review“A pulse-pounding, down-the-rabbit-hole-tale where everyone has a secret, information comes at a deadly price, and danger is always closer than you think. Be prepared to stay up very late; this book is worth it!” (Lisa Gardner )THE CLOUD is a non-stop, paranoid thriller whose terrors are all too believable. Richtel spins today’s cutting-edge technology into a story that will keep you guessing to the last page--and render you speechless when its final secret is revealed. (Joseph Finder ) About the AuthorMatt Richtel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times technology journalist and novelist. He is the author of two previous critically acclaimed novels, Hooked and Devil's Plaything, and his fiction, like his journalism, focuses on the impact of technology on how people live, behave, and love in the 21st century. He won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for his series on distracted driving. He lives in San Francisco with his family.

We all keep secrets, but what if someone wasn't just stealing our secrets but changing them… and our brains? Journalist Nat Idle is nearly gunned down in Golden Gate Park. He quickly learns it was no random attack. Suddenly, in pursuit of the truth, he's running for his life through the shadows of Silicon Valley, a human lab animal caught in a deadly maze of neurotechnology and institutional paranoia. And his survival rests entirely in the hands of his eighty-five-year-old grandmother, Lane, who's suffering from dementia and can't remember the secret at the heart of the world-changing conspiracy. Author, technology reporter, Pulitzer Prize winner, Matt Richtel has dreamed up an exquisite nightmare firmly grounded in true science. The future is now, the possibilities endless… and positively terrifying.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist comes a pulse-pounding technological thriller—as ingenious as the works of Michael Crichton and as irresistible as a summer blockbuster—in which one man has three days to prevent the outbreak of World War III and the world's annihilationWhat if you knew the world was going to end?What if no one believed you?Jeremy Stillwater is a genius with computers but not so much with people. Maddeningly self-righteous, he's alienated his girlfriend and infuriated his Silicon Valley financiers and the government agents who saw military promise in his innovation: a program that seemed to be able to predict war.Even Jeremy has begun to doubt the algorithm's capabilities. Then one day his computer has a message for him. War is coming. Three days and counting until massive nuclear conflict.Is it real? A malicious joke? A bug?Isolated yet relentless, Jeremy soon uncovers an ancient...