★Sandford, John. Toxic Prey. Putnam. (Prey, Bk. 34). Apr. 2024. 400p. ISBN 9780593714492. $32. M

When British tropical-and-infectious-disease expert Lionel Scott disappears from his job at Los Alamos, Letty Davenport, who works for Homeland Security, is sent to London to talk with his colleagues. She teams up with an MI5 agent, but after just three interviews, Letty asks Homeland Security to call in several U.S. Marshals, including her father, Lucas Davenport. It turns out that Scott has been obsessed with the Gaia hypothesis. Convinced that the Earth is dying, and the only way to save it is to kill half the population, he’s developed a virus that is worse than COVID. Letty and Lucas lead a team that heads to New Mexico to find Scott before he releases his biological weapon. They find that a small group of fanatics have joined Scott and are willing to die to save the planet, and Letty knows that her team will need luck as well as manpower to stop them. VERDICT A believable, timely, edge-of-one’s-seat thriller involving climate change and a virus. Whenever Letty Davenport is involved (as in previous outing Dark Angel), it’s disaster on a grand scale.