Product Description

Nelson DeMille's narrative engine is one of the best in the business, and it chugs away in grand style in this story of buried treasure and biological warfare on a tiny spit of land off Long Island. As told by a wry, wounded New York City detective who is drafted to explore a couple of murders, Plum Island is a rich pudding of flavorful (if familiar) ingredients, including a ferocious storm at sea. Other DeMille epics in paperback include By the Rivers of Babylon, The General's Daughter, The Gold Coast, Spencerville, and Word of Honor.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36038 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

Amazon.com Review
Nelson DeMille's narrative engine is one of the best in the business, and it chugs away in grand style in this story of buried treasure and biological warfare on a tiny spit of land off Long Island. As told by a wry, wounded New York City detective who is drafted to explore a couple of murders, Plum Island is a rich pudding of flavorful (if familiar) ingredients, including a ferocious storm at sea. Other DeMille epics in paperback include By the Rivers of Babylon, The General's Daughter, The Gold Coast, Spencerville, and Word of Honor.

From Library Journal
While investigating the murder of a young Long Island couple, an NYPD detective is stunned to find that they may have been involved in dealing genetically altered viruses. A 500,000-copy first printing.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
On Long Island's North Fork, wonderfully roguish NYPD bad-boy detective John Corey assists the local police chief at a crime scene that features a house deck garnished with a married couple dead of clean head shots. Investigators suppose that the pair, researchers at a heavily guarded lab on Plum Island, were involved in smuggling a viral antidote. But Corey, unpersuaded, soon discovers that local history and buried-treasure lore fascinated the victims, which led to a relationship with North Fork's leading socialite, the foppish Fredric Tobin. Three more people die prematurely, and the chase is on. DeMille's Mike Hammer^-like cop is a chuckle-provoking winner, and the plot cleverly combines biological hazards and shiver-me-timbers pirate legends. An entertaining mix from the big-selling DeMille. Gilbert Taylor

Customer Reviews

Follow John Corey into the Mysteries of Long Island
This is the first DeMille book I have read and I loved it. I have subsequently read "The Gold Coast" and "The Charm School" both of which I enjoyed but not as much as I enjoyed reading Plum Island.

First of all, the setting. DeMille describes a charming east Long Island that I never paid much attention to (I travel through Orient Point a half a dozen times a year). We receive an interesting portrayal of the quaint villages, the local flavor, and the snotty wine growers. DeMille also gives the reader a dose of the history of the area describing the early times when pirate landed on its shores. Then there is Plum Island itself which I will gaze at more closely now each time I pass it on the ferry.

The characters are well developed. John Corey, the lead character, is this off-duty detective who gets caught up in this mystery. He's brash, sometimes rude, prefers a good beer to a vintage glass of wine and is very likeable. The other characters, including the minor ones, are defined enough to feel like you know them.

The plot. I won't give anything away. ..just a good mystery that leads you down a few different directions.

Good Novel, Corey is a Trip!!
Plum Island is my third Nelson DeMille book and like the previous two I've read (Gold Coast and Charm School), it's a little long winded, probably 100 pages longer than it needed to be, but the primary character, John Corey is his best character to date. I agree with other reviewers that he is arrogant, but he is pretty funny with his sarcasm, which makes him tolerable when the story drags.

The storyline, which deals with the murder of employees of Plum Island, where work is done with hazardous materials (including anthrax) is obviously very timely today. It makes a lot more sense today than in 1997 when this book was first published. You get to learn a little about this stuff, so DeMille's research doesn't go to waste here.

I found fault with DeMille's decision to let Corey figure out who the criminal was midway through the book and then spending the rest of the book showing how he gets this person. It would have been nice if he threw in a plot twist somewhere later to shake things up and add some suspense, but it's a good book that will lead me to read The Lion's Game (another Corey book) in the future.

John Corey ... what a piece of work!
Take Michael Connelly's Detective Harry Bosch, a hard-boiled, talented, nearly burnt-out loner with lots of psychological baggage and absolutely no respect for superiors or procedure. Add the self-deprecating faux stumble-bum approach of Peter Falk's Columbo and toss in a heaping helping of smart-aleck motor mouth Rodney Dangerfield complete inability to control the flow of virulent sarcasm and wisecracks! Sounds a little much, doesn't it? But he's our hero for Nelson DeMille's "Plum Island".

John Corey, NYPD homicide detective, is on medical leave recovering from bullet wounds when his friend, chief of the Southold Police Department, enlists his aid looking into the double homicide of Tom and Judy Gordon, also friends of Corey, and employees of Plum Island, the nearby high-level bio-containment facility studying deadly animal diseases such as anthrax and simian Ebola. First terrifying appearances were that some sort of biological terrorist threat had gone sour but the old rule of "follow the money" lead to a somewhat more tolerable line of investigation. It seemed the Gordons had stolen a vaccine with the motive of peddling it to the pharmaceutical world for billions.

But Corey's in-your-face persistence was uncovering clues and details that just didn't seem to mesh with that story. Simple drug-running was a possibility but even that didn't quite click. Eventually, Corey uncovers an amazingly entertaining story of greed, money, murder, mayhem and political skullduggery spanning three hundred years of history and ranging geographically from New York, to the Caribbean, to England and back again.

In a style that reminded me of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's incurable penchant for technical sidebars, DeMille has tossed off a bewildering variety of essays that entertained, informed and, at the same time, moved the story forward. The staged lecture tour of Plum Island's hazardous facility, hosted first by Security Chief Paul Stevens and followed by the facility's director Dr Zollner was worth the reading of the book all by itself. But you'll also be treated to snippets of detail on coastal marine navigation, a cornucopia of procedural information on the necessary foundation police work to solving a homicide and (are you ready for this?) a rather extensive history of Captain Kidd and his 17th century privateering exploits that ultimately ended in his execution in England!

Lots of promise to be sure and there's certainly no doubt about DeMille's skill as a writer! But, just as a little bit of someone like John Corey would go a long, long way in real life, his constant cracking wise left me cold on the printed page as well! If DeMille had seen his way to lopping 100 pages off the final draft, it would have been just right and I would have ended the story not only entertained by the police procedural but laughing at Corey's antics in the bargain. Just three stars but recommended as a quick and entertaining piece of brain candy anyway! Enjoy!

Paul Weiss