Instinct Book

The high adventure of James Rollins combines with the gripping suspense of Scott Sigler in this second installment in the Chess Team Series

A genetic disease known as Brugada Syndrome kills its victims without warning, without symptom. When the President of the United States falls victim to a weaponized and contagious strain of the disease, the Chess Team—King, Queen, Rook, Knight and Bishop—are assigned to protect Sara Fogg, a CDC detective, as she journeys to the source of the new strain: the Annamite Mountains in Vietnam. Surrounded by Vietnam War era landmines, harsh terrain and more than one military force not happy about the return of American boots to the Ho Chi Minh trail, the fight for survival becomes a grueling battle in the humid jungle.

Pursued by VPLA Death Volunteers, Vietnam’s Special Forces unit, the team’s flight through a maze of archaic ruins reveals an ancient secret...a primal secret that may stop the disease from sweeping the globe—even as it threatens both the mission and their lives.

Publishers Weekly

Robinson’s slam-bang second Chess Team thriller (after Pulse) opens in 1995 in Vietnam’s Annamite Mountains, where Dr. Anthony Weston, a cryptozoologist, is studying a strange tribe of protohumans. When a pack of the creatures attacks Weston, one of them decides he’d make a tasty snack (“he could taste the decaying flesh of some previous meal that clung to its two-inch-long canines”). Fourteen years later, Jack Sigler, head of the elite Chess Team, is searching for the source of a deadly plague known as the Brugada syndrome, which has stricken the new U.S. president. Jack (call sign “King”) and his team members—Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn—are soon in Vietnam on the trail of a cure. There they find a vast mountain hideout with a city built of bones. Robinson, who’s been criticized for writing stories that are too much like video games, has come up with a wildly inventive yarn that reads as well on the page as it would play on a computer screen. (Apr.)