The Seventh Plague

The Seventh Plague is the twelfth full novel in James Rollins’s Sigma Force series, the long running thriller franchise built around a covert team of soldier scientists who work for a black ops branch of DARPA. By the time this book arrived in 2016, Rollins had perfected his formula. Open with a teaser set in the past or in some remote corner of the world. Cut to an archaeological or scientific puzzle that connects modern day characters to that distant event. Send Sigma Force in to figure out the puzzle while a much larger threat builds in the background.

The central hook here is the disappearance of Professor Harold McCabe, a famous archaeologist who walked out of the Sudanese desert two years after going missing, only to die soon after his return. McCabe had been searching for evidence that the biblical plagues of Egypt actually happened, and the autopsy of his body suggests something is mummifying him from the inside out. Painter Crowe and the Sigma team are pulled in to figure out what McCabe found in the desert and why the same condition is now spreading. The plot moves through Egypt, Sudan, Italy, and the United States in the kind of globe trotting structure Rollins’s readers expect.

What Rollins does well in these novels is balance the thriller pacing with enough real science and history to make the bigger ideas land. He cites his sources at the end of each book and goes out of his way to mark where the speculation begins. The action sequences are crisp, the characters have grown across the series, and the larger arc involving the secretive Guild has its hooks in this entry too. Long time fans will not be disappointed and new readers can pick this up with a quick refresher on the series cast.