When I first arrived at Orbit earlier this year the first book I read was PARASITE (US | UK | AUS) by New York Times bestselling author Mira Grant. Even though I’d been a huge admirer of her Newsflesh series I was not fully prepared for how it would affect me. One notable influence was that it added the unlikely element of paranoid thrills to a customarily mundane process: signing up for healthcare.

Ringing in my head as I reviewed benefits and added beneficiaries were these ominous words:

Your health is too important to trust to just anyone.

Choose SymboGen.

Choose freedom.

Thankfully their services were not on offer, but the machinations of this novel’s medical corporation and the plight of Sally got inside my head with a riveting blend of creepy suspense, complex characters, and a terrifyingly believable look at science gone extremely wrong.

Parasite, the first book in Mira Grant’s Parasitology series, is out today and you should not miss out.

But don’t take my word for it:

“A creepy spine-tingler of a medical thriller”— Charles Stross

“An incredible, disturbingly plausible tale of what happens to a world where medical treatments have minds of their own.” — io9.com

“A riveting near-future medical thriller that reads like the genetically-engineered love child of Robin Cook and Michael Crichton.” — John Joseph Adams

“It’s a whole lot of awesome.”— Tor.com

“An exceptionally creepy medical-horror thriller that’s the perfect spine-tingling read for Halloween.”— Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Grant extends the zombie theme of her Newsflesh trilogy to incorporate thoughtful reflections on biomedical issues that are both ominously challenging and eerily plausible. Sally is a complex, compassionate character, well suited to this exploration of trust, uncertainty, and the price of progress.”— Publishers Weekly

“Fans of [the Newsflesh] series will definitely want to check this new book out. But fans of Michael Crichton-style technothrillers will be equally enthralled: as wild as Grant’s premise is, the novel is firmly anchored in real-world science and technology.” — Booklist

“PARASITE will be hard to dislodge from your brain.”— SciFi Magazine

PARASITE is out now in hardcover and ebook. For more about the book, visit symbogen.net or follow @SymboGenCorp on Twitter, and check here to see all the book tour dates.