Synopsis

From flooded refugee camps in Thailand to posh gourmet restaurants in Maryland; from corporate boardrooms to cholera camps in Bengal; from US Naval bases to Maya ruins in the jungles of Central America; Vampire Chimeras carries you along on its tense roller coaster plot. How will Dr. Diana Rigsby, a seasoned medical researcher and physician, stop a rampaging hemorrhagic fever threatening the lives of those she loves… especially if it arose out of something she may have created.

Not just a medical thriller, Vampire Chimeras is filled with cutting edge science, backing plausible plot twists, spun out as a multiply layered moral play, providing lots of points of debate. Its metaphors force the reader to ask, who/what are the real Vampires? The Chimeras?

Excerpt

"Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing..."

- Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire 

After that seemingly endless journey of airport layovers and connecting coach seat flights from Dulles to Miami to Guatemala City, Victor realizes he is aching all over.  But it's that pounding throbbing behind his eyes, which almost blinds him.  He can barely get through customs inspection, and now finds he is stuck waiting impatiently for the bus to arrive that will take him on yet another day long trip, to his family's rural mountain hacienda in Boca Grande.  Will I ever finally get there?

When it is not pouring down rain, it is steam coming up from the hot buildings and puddled walks.  The humidity oppresses so.  Having come from a cool spring in the States, he's not yet used to this clammy climate closing in on him.  And mosquitoes are everywhere, relentlessly biting.  Finally his bus arrives, crowded as usual.  He elbows his way on board and displaces a chicken from a seat, grabbing it quick, stowing his gear in rare free space.

Ahh last leg of the journey.  Just this one bus ride and then I will be home and back with my family.  They must be so worried.  This year's dengue came on fast and hard.  Can only get worse now with all this endless rain.  Damn.  Really hope this vaccine makes a difference.

Looking out the bus window, he watches as the remaining petals on the white star flowers of the hillside's Arabica coffee trees, drift away like a snowflakes, revealing their green coffee fruit berries beneath.  Further in the distance he can see fields of spiky bushes, where stalks, heavy with ripe pineapple fruit, sway slowly with the growing wind.  Oh how he has missed this, his homeland.

He sees yet another storm is brewing on the east horizon, dark clouds condensing, ominously.  Will it hold off long enough to let me get home before it hits?

Finally his stop arrives.  He gets up to get off the bus and grabs his gear.  Shocks of pain shoot up his arm, neck and back, forcing him to stop and catch his breath.  The chicken and a bleating kid, seize this opportunity to jump quickly behind him and fight to occupy his emptied seat.  An entropic chaotic mass exodus moves him off the bus and out on to the road -- the road that he must walk up, to finally reach his home.

Touching ground, the bus pulls away behind him, belching black diesel smoke.

In the falling twilight the shadows cloak the Maya Acropolis ruins off a ways on the hillside, peeking out fro