O'Toole is back. Once again in over his head and going beyond his authority to help a friend, he is shanghaied, shot up, shot at and left for dead before he begins to recover and realizes that what looked like a plain vanilla biological-warfare-gone-wrong-with-the-concomitant-threat-to-the-world case has a lot more facets than first met the eye. A young doctor who works at a humanitarian research facility high in New York's Adirondack Mountains is found -- near death-- by a couple of boys on a fishing trip. They get him to the hospital in Lake Placid, and, though puzzled and alarmed by his symptoms, the emergency room physician finally gets him stabilized. O'Toole arrives on the scene, tracks down the doctor's movements in the preceding days, and begins to suspect that the Beckmann Institute might be up to its ears in biological warfare, that the government might be involved, and that some members of the high-power, high finance men's club that meets every year on the 2500-acre Beckmann estate are willing to go to great lengths to keep out prying eyes.
Back in the mountains, (see Hell's Creek, iUniverse, 2003, Amazon et al.) O'Toole is left to his own devices, and, unsupported by the home office, he is forced to make do, save his friend Molly and punish the perpetrators without being jettisoned at sea, beaten to a pulp, and/or left to die with a wracking cough and various other very bad symptoms. A close call.