A seventeen year old girl wakes up with a cold. Four hours later she is racked by convulsions and chewing her fingers. Within minutes she is dead. Across town a homeless man is brought into hospital - already dead, his spine bent at an impossible angle. He too has begun to bite himself. The autopsies prove that a previously unknown virus is at large, turning people's brains into "glassy pudding". It replicates horribly fast, it is always fatal, and no one knows how it is being transmitted. It's just too efficient to be entirely natural.
It would take a scientific genius to design such a surefire killer - finding this genius is the most complex puzzle Alice Austen has ever faced.
