ACCEPTABLE RISK by Robin Cook *****

Always a scare reading Robin Cook and his medical stuff gone awry. This time it's primarily about the Salem witch episode and how the rye fungus acted to cause hallucinations and other weird behaviors.

Starts off with a nurse, Kim who is related to one of the people tried as a witch. She keeps diving into the old paperwork in the attic and cellar until she's prompted to find a relic that was left behind by her ancestor Elizabeth. When she finds it she's shocked.

Meanwhile her boyfriend is a scientist and with a few others they open a lab in her extra roomy barn and instead of waiting for testing results they decide to all take various amounts of the drug themselves. This was the same rye fungus used by Elizabeth to bake the bread that caused hallucinations in the children of Salem. So it gets quite gory in some parts towards  the end which is expected.

I liked the story, the people were almost real to me, most of them anyway. The drug developed from the fungus is believable and most if not all our medicines are derived from plants or fungus anyway so that part is real enough to be scary. I liked it and would buy it, actually did at a library sale.

EXTREME PREY by John Sandford *****

An Alex Delaware story. This is a page turner and you have a hard time putting it down. Lots of action as Alex is on a quest to protect and find anyone aiming to harm a Gov running for President.

He has to question people and has suspicions about the deaths following along behind him. He works with other agencies as a free lancer for now and does a pretty good job of sorting out the killers and at the last minute the method of their killing the governor.

I like it and I would buy it.

The HATCHING by Ezekiel Boone ****

If you're already afraid of spiders then you don't want to read this book. Some kind of alien spider has overtaken countries a bit at at time until everyone panics and atomic bombs go off. These spiders are hunters and eat people, they also send threads into the air to fly around and go other places which is actually a bit to swallow but anyways that's what they do.

The army can't stop them, even scientists end up getting in trouble with them. There are also breeding spiders (inside animals and humans OF COURSE) and perhaps more trouble in the future.

So I can see where this can be exaggerated to some extent but the extent to which this is written is a bit overwhelming and somewhat unbelievable. I know we have cans of spider spray around here someplace and geez you can't even step on them before you're consumed by a pack of them? Even when others are being attacked? I don't get how they overtake hundreds of people so fast they can't be stepped on or squashed or sprayed individually to die. Why can't they be brushed off and stepped on? If everyone did it? WTF?

In the RW there are also sticky traps that can catch them if they walk across it and I'm sure there can be quickly developed poisons to end the b.s. but in this story forget all that. Alien spiders. So that's about that. I would get it at the library.