Dogs

I really liked this. Gripping, interesting, believable enough for fiction... Like a Crichton novel only with well written characters. I could absolutely imagine this being made into a summer blockbuster action movie - and I definitely mean that as a compliment.

I really liked this book. It was a fun, fast read. The plot was intriguing, the basic idea original. It kept me entertained in two waiting rooms and during one sucky afternoon.

I'm not a fan of the gut wrenching thrillers where the hero goes through almost pointless torture from multiple directions. I like a thriller where there is a puzzle to solve and many obstacles to overcome along the way. I like to ask myself, "How is she going to get out of this?" not "Is she going to get out of this?" I like to have confidence in my main character. This book was like that.

Nancy Kress writes tense novels about the wide-ranging societal consequences of a small technological or biological development. In this short (>300pgs), contemporary thriller, a sudden outbreak infects dogs and drives them into a vicious frenzy. The small American town of Taylor is ground zero, and the novel follows several very different characters living there, including a young boy who hides his dog, a redneck who joins the anti-animal-control underground, and a young nurse. The two main characters are Jess, an animal control officer, and Tessa, an FBI agent who left the agency after her Arabic husband's death.

This felt a bit like two novels. One half was about the outbreak: how do people react when animals they trust jump for show more their throats? Several of the small-town folk seem more like caricatures than human; the two anti-animal-control militia members are stupid and narrow-minded in ways I have trouble accepting. The other half was written better, but less interesting: just a basic spy thriller. All in all, an enjoyable, exciting book--I read it in a single sitting. show less

Normally well-behaved dogs are suddenly turning vicious. Now the town is under quarantine, and under siege, as the desperate search for a cure--and the cause--is underway. Some people want to kill all the dogs, even the uninfected, others to save them, still others just want the truth.

Nancy Kress is a brilliant author. Her award-winning Beggars trilogy is one of my favorite SF series. Dogs, however, is formulaic and could have been written by any competent thriller author. The protagonist is a woman who recently quit her job at the FBI after the death of her husband, moving to a small town, which was peaceful until dogs started mysteriously attacking their owners. She receives mysterious emails from an acquaintance of her late husband and goes underground to find the truth and clear her husband and herself of any wrongdoing. While I haven't read exactly this book before, it feels very familiar, and there were never any brilliant twists. I do not recommend it, at least not to fans of Kress's science fiction like myself.

Normally well-behaved dogs are suddenly turning vicious. Now the town is under quarantine, and under siege, as the desperate search for a cure--and the cause--is underway. Some people want to kill all the dogs, even the uninfected, others to save them, still others just want the truth.

Ok so all of the dogs in this small town are infected by rabies-like disease which causes normally friendly and mild mannered dogs to flip out and attack-their owners, other dogs, etc. Unfortunately most of those attacked are children-which is heartbreaking.