Plague War

Acknowledgments

More than anyone else, I want to thank my wife and sons for their remarkable patience and support.

Sweetheart, I really do love you more than my computer.

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I’d also like to express my gratitude to the experts who shared their education with me. Any mistakes are mine. Fortunately, no one really knows what would happen to the environment or to the geopolitical world if you removed all warm-blooded life below ten thousand feet. My thanks go to Mike May, Professor of Entomology at Rutgers University; Harry Greene, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University; Major Brian Woolworth, U.S. Army Special Forces; Lt. Colonel J. Brian “Bear” Lihani, USAF (ret.); and to my father, Gus Carlson, Ph.D., engineer, and former division head at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. All of these people were instrumental in shaping Plague War.

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A huge thanks also to the Ultimate Grandparents Club: Patti, Ute, Char, Bill, Byron, and my father, Gus, again. The extra days and hours you provided, whether babysitting, grocery shopping, or taking us away for a weekend of fun and rest, were crucial to ‚nishing this book on time.

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There are other people deserving of mention — our friends Adad Warda and Charlie and Violeta Escobar, for their help and support; Judith Murello and Eric Williams, who have done a sensational job with the covers for the series so far; Meghan Mahler, for her maps; and John Robert Marlow and Janet Lewis, for maintaining my web site at www.jverse.com. Come see what they’ve done. The site offers free ‚ction, interviews, tour dates, and advance information on upcoming books.

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As always, I want to acknowledge my agent, Donald Maass, and Cameron McClure and Stephen Barbara in the of‚ce.

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Thank you to everyone at Penguin USA. My editor, Anne Sowards, went the extra mile, and my publicist, Valerie Cortes, has been outstanding. I also appreciate the help of Ginjer Buchanan, Cam “The Other Cam” Dufty, and the rest of the good people behind this novel. They say a writer works alone, but the truth is that a small army put their smarts and energy into producing Plague War. I hope you enjoyed it.