She Thought It Was Bluetongue

About this book:

When Dr. Maeve Callan trades her Edinburgh cleanroom for the mud-caked reality of her childhood valley, she expects routine lambing season—not a spring outbreak of Bluetongue in freezing April, with no midges in sight. The symptoms are textbook: cyanotic tongues, swollen muzzles, fevers that burn through newborn lambs. But the vector biology is impossible, the blood too dark and viscous, and the heavy black silt along Blackwood Creek hides something that doesn't belong in any veterinary manual. As cattle begin collapsing in the lower pastures with the same impossible presentation, Maeve finds herself tracing a pathogen that shouldn't exist, through soil that remembers every hand that ever turned it.

Old George Abernathy calls it Black Creek Fever, a name buried since 1888 when three hundred sheep died in a fortnight and the valley floor was fenced off for forty years. The Ministry wants a standstill order; the farmers need the spring sale; and Maeve's own skin has begun to show a faint, painless bruise where a single drop of lamb's blood touched her wrist. With each microscope slide, the line between environmental contaminant and engineered horror blurs—those perfect, pitted spheres in the creek mud aren't algae, and they're aggregating with purpose.

Some pathogens wait in the dark for the right conditions to rise. Some soils don't forget what they've swallowed. And in the Blackwood Valley, the spring rains have just begun to fall.