Richard Preston

The Real Death in Paradise is cosy crime in the sun recounting the idyllic two years ex DCI Richard Preston spent as one of the twelve young police officers sent to the tropical paradise and infamous tax haven of the Cayman Islands Who would not love the opportunity to work in a tropical paradise live in a luxury hotel suite drive a jeep learn to scuba dive travel widely around the region and buy a share in a speedboat What could possibly go wrong But when faced with the reality of life in the Caribbean including foiling a turtle egg kidnap a rum smuggling ring and corrupt police officers Richard soon found out that the truth was far more interesting than he ever could have imagined For anyone that has watched and loved the BBC show this is the real Death in Paradise

In March 2014, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was first reported. By October 2014, it had become the largest and deadliest occurrence of the disease.Over 4,500 people have died. Almost 10,000 cases have been reported, across Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the United States.Impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone is the terrifying, true-life account of when this highly infectious virus spread from the rainforests of Africa to the suburbs of Washington, D.C in 1989. A secret SWAT team of soldiers and scientists were quickly tasked with halting the outbreak. And they did. But now, that very same virus is back. And we could be just one wrong move away from a pandemic.

Hidden away in foggy, uncharted rain forest valleys in Northern California are the largest and tallest organisms the world has ever sustained the coast redwood trees, Sequoia sempervirens. Ninety-six percent of the ancient redwood forests have been destroyed by logging, but the untouched fragments that remain are among the great wonders of nature. The biggest redwoods have trunks up to thirty feet wide and can rise more than thirty-five stories above the ground, forming cathedral-like structures in the air. Until recently, redwoods were thought to be virtually impossible to ascend, and the canopy at the tops of these majestic trees was undiscovered. In The Wild Trees, Richard Preston unfolds the spellbinding story of Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine, and the tiny group of daring botanists and amateur naturalists that found a lost world above California, a world that is dangerous, hauntingly beautiful, and unexplored. The canopy voyagers are young just college students when they start their quest and they share a passion for these trees, persevering in spite of sometimes crushing personal obstacles and failings. They take big risks, they ignore common wisdom (such as the notion that there's nothing left to discover in North America), and they even make love in hammocks stretched between branches three hundred feet in the air. The deep redwood canopy is a vertical Eden filled with mosses, lichens, spotted salamanders, hanging gardens of ferns, and thickets of huckleberry bushes, all growing out of massive trunk systems that have fused and formed flying buttresses, sometimes carved into blackened chambers, hollowed out by fire, called "fire caves." Thick layers of soil sitting on limbs harbor animal and plant life that is unknown to science. Humans move through the deep canopy suspended on ropes, far out of sight of the ground, knowing that the price of a small mistake can be a plunge to one's death. Preston's account of this amazing world, by turns terrifying, moving, and fascinating, is an adventure story told in novelistic detail by a master of nonfiction narrative. The author shares his protagonists' passion for tall trees, and he mastered the techniques of tall-tree climbing to tell the story in The Wild Trees the story of the fate of the world's most splendid forests and of the imperiled biosphere itself.

The bard of biological weapons captures the drama of the front lines.Richard Danzig, former secretary of the navy The first major bioterror event in the United States-the anthrax attacks in October 2001-was a clarion call for scientists who work with hot agents to find ways of protecting civilian populations against biological weapons. In The Demon in the Freezer, his first nonfiction book since The Hot Zone, a #1 New York Times bestseller, Richard Preston takes us into the heart of Usamriid, the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, once the headquarters of the U.S. biological weapons program and now the epicenter of national biodefense. Peter Jahrling, the top scientist at Usamriid, a wry virologist who cut his teeth on Ebola, one of the worlds most lethal emerging viruses, has ORCON security clearance that gives him access to top secret information on bioweapons. His most urgent priority is to develop a drug that will take on smallpox-and win. Eradicated from the planet in 1979 in one of the great triumphs of modern science, the smallpox virus now resides, officially, in only two high-security freezers-at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and in Siberia, at a Russian virology institute called Vector. But the demon in the freezer has been set loose. It is almost certain that illegal stocks are in the possession of hostile states, including Iraq and North Korea. Jahrling is haunted by the thought that biologists in secret labs are using genetic engineering to create a new superpox virus, a smallpox resistant to all vaccines. Usamriid went into a state of Delta Alert on September 11 and activated its emergency response teams when the first anthrax letters were opened in New York and Washington, D.C. Preston reports, in unprecedented detail, on the government s response to the attacks and takes us into the ongoing FBI investigation. His story is based on interviews with top-level FBI agents and with Dr. Steven Hatfill. Jahrling is leading a team of scientists doing controversial experiments with live smallpox virus at CDC. Preston takes us into the lab where Jahrling is reawakening smallpox and explains, with cool and devastating precision, what may be at stake if his last bold experiment fails.

A deadly virus - and a desperate race against time.One of the most horrifying things Ive ever read in my entire life Stephen KingOne spring morning in New York City a seventeen-year-old student wakes up feeling vaguely ill. Hours later she is having violent seizures, blood is pouring out of her nose, and she begins to attack her own body in the most hideous way imaginable. Soon, other gruesome deaths of a similar nature have been discovered, and the autopsies reveal that a previously unknown virus is at large. It replicates horribly fast, it is always fatal - and is just too efficient to be entirely natural.When the Centre for Disease Control sends a forensic pathologist to investigate, her discoveries precipitate a national crisis.THE COBRA EVENT is a dramatic, heart-stopping thriller of an all-too-real threat.

When Steve Sillett was 19 years old, he free-climbed with no safety equipment and no training one of the tallest trees on earth, in the redwood forests of Prairie Creek, California. 30 storeys above the ground he glimpsed an undiscovered ecosystem, and his passion for that astonishing world would transform the rest of his life. Over the next twenty years, Sillett and a close group of friends charted this system, discovering mosses and lichen never seen before, and travelling among branches so densely interwoven they form incredible sky-high walkways. There are only twenty people on earth who have climbed the worlds tallest trees and who know their location. In writing The Wild Trees, Richard Preston not only managed to gain access to this group, but began to climb these hidden giants himself, putting his life in danger in order to understand the powerful connection between the massive trees and the worlds last great explorers.

An instant classic in the vein of Jurassic Park, this boundary-pushing novel has all the hallmarks of Michael Crichtons greatest adventures with its combination of pulse-pounding thrills, cutting-edge technology, and extraordinary research Three men are found dead in a locked second-floor office in Honolulu. There is no sign of struggle, though their bodies are covered in ultra-fine, razor-sharp cuts. With no evidence, the police dismiss it as a bizarre suicide pact. But the murder weapon is still in the room, almost invisible to the human eye. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, seven graduate students at the forefront of their fields are recruited by a pioneering microbiology start-up company. Nanigen MicroTechnologies sends them to a mysterious laboratory in Hawaii, where they are promised access to tools that will open up a whole new scientific frontier. But this opportunity of a lifetime will teach them the true cost of existing at the cutting-edge The group becomes prey to a technology of radical, unimaginable power and is thrust out into the teeming rainforest. Armed only with their knowledge of the natural world, the young scientists face a hostile wilderness that threatens danger at every turn. To survive, they must harness the awe-inspiring creative and destructive forces of nature itself.

COMING TO NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON 27 MAY 2019_________In March 2014, the Ebola outbreak in West Africa was first reported. By October 2014, it had become the largest and deadliest occurrence of the disease. Over 4,500 people have died. Almost 10,000 cases have been reported, across Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Nigeria and the United States. Impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone is the terrifying, true-life account of when this highly infectious virus spread from the rainforests of Africa to the suburbs of Washington, D.C in 1989. A secret SWAT team of soldiers and scientists were quickly tasked with halting the outbreak. And they did. But now, that very same virus is back. And we could be just one wrong move away from a pandemic.

Bizarre illnesses and plagues that kill people in the most unspeakable ways. Obsessive and inspired efforts by scientists to solve mysteries and save lives. From The Hot Zone to The Demon in the Freezer and beyond, Richard Prestons bestselling works have mesmerized readers everywhere by showing them strange worlds of nature they never dreamed of.Panic in Level 4 is a grand tour through the eerie and unforgettable universe of Richard Preston, filled with incredible characters and mysteries that refuse to leave ones mind. Here are dramatic true stories from this acclaimed and award-winning author, including: The phenomenon of self-cannibals, who suffer from a rare genetic condition caused by one wrong letter in their DNA that forces them to compulsively chew their own fleshand why everyone may have a touch of this disease. The search for the unknown host of Ebola virus, an organism hidden somewhere in African rain forests, where the disease finds its way into the human species, causing outbreaks of unparalleled horror. The brilliant Russian brothersone mathematician divided between two bodieswho built a supercomputer in their apartment from mail-order parts in an attempt to find hidden order in the number pi (). In fascinating, intimate, and exhilarating detail, Richard Preston portrays the frightening forces and constructive discoveries that are currently roiling and reordering our world, once again proving himself a master of the nonfiction narrative and, as noted in The Washington Post, a science writer with an uncommon gift for turning complex biology into riveting page-turners.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An urgent wake-up call about the future of emerging viruses and a gripping account of the doctors and scientists fighting to protect us, told through the story of the deadly 20132014 Ebola epidemic Crisis in the Red Zone reads like a thriller. That the story it tells is all true makes it all more terrifying.Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of The Sixth Extinction From the #1 bestselling author of The Hot Zone, now a National Geographic original miniseries . . .This time, Ebola started with a two-year-old child who likely had contact with a wild creature and whose entire family quickly fell ill and died. The ensuing global drama activated health professionals in North America, Europe, and Africa in a desperate race against time to contain the viral wildfire. By the endas the virus mutated into its deadliest form, and spread farther and faster than ever before30,000 people would be infected, and the dead would be spread across eight countries on three continents.In this taut and suspenseful medical drama, Richard Preston deeply chronicles the pandemic, in which we saw for the first time the specter of Ebola jumping continents, crossing the Atlantic, and infecting people in America. Rich in characters and conflictphysical, emotional, and ethicalCrisis in the Red Zone is an immersion in one of the great public health calamities of our time.Preston writes of doctors and nurses in the field putting their own lives on the line, of government bureaucrats and NGO administrators moving, often fitfully, to try to contain the outbreak, and of pharmaceutical companies racing to develop drugs to combat the virus. He also explores the charged ethical dilemma over who should and did receive the rare doses of an experimental treatment when they became available at the peak of the disaster.Crisis in the Red Zone makes clear that the outbreak of 20132014 is a harbinger of further, more severe outbreaks, and of emerging viruses heretofore unimaginedin any country, on any continent. In our ever more interconnected world, with roads and towns cut deep into the jungles of equatorial Africa, viruses both familiar and undiscovered are being unleashed into more densely populated areas than ever before. The more we discover about the virosphere, the more we realize its deadly potential. Crisis in the Red Zone is an exquisitely timely book, a stark warning of viral outbreaks to come.

Seven years before Richard Preston wrote about horrifying viruses in The Hot Zone, he turned his attention to the cosmos. In First Light, he demonstrates his gift for creating an exciting and absorbing narrative around a complex scientific subject--in this case the efforts by astronomers at the Palomar Observatory in the San Gabriel Mountains of California to peer to the farthest edges of space through the Hale Telescope, attempting to solve the riddle of the creation of the universe.Richard Prestons name became a household word with The Hot Zone, which sold nearly 800,000 copies in hardcover, was on The New York Timess bestseller list for 42 weeks, and was the subject of countless magazine and newspaper articles. Preston has become a sought-after commentator on popular science subjects.

The Cobra Event is set in motion one spring morning in New York City, when a seventeen-year-old student wakes up feeling vaguely ill. Hours later she is having violent seizures, blood is pouring out of her nose, and she has begun a hideous process of self-cannibalization. Soon, other gruesome deaths of a similar nature have been discovered, and the Centers for Disease Control sends a forensic pathologist to investigate. What she finds precipitates a federal crisis.The details of this story are fictional, but they are based on a scrupulously thorough inquiry into the history of biological weapons and their use by civilian and military terrorists. Richard Prestons sources include members of the FBI and the United States military, public health officials, intelligence officers in foreign governments, and scientists who have been involved in the testing of strategic bioweapons. The accounts of what they have seen and what they expect to happen are chilling.The Cobra Event is a dramatic, heart-stopping account of a very real threat, told with the skill and authority that made Prestons The Hot Zone an internationally acclaimed bestseller.