Javier Mendez is being transported to a facility where he can develop his research on a strange virus affecting the bee population. When the brakes of the vehicle he is traveling in fail, killing the driver and second passenger and leaving Javier hurt and disorientated, he collects his case which contains specimens critical to his research and stumbles away from the wreckage, only to collapse in the garden of a homeless shelter. Set in the near future, The Seventh Seed by Allison Maruska chronicles Javier’s astounding adventures as he is befriended by a worker at the shelter, and together they set out to try to continue his research and hopefully create a vaccine to combat the apian-borne virus he has been working on. Their attempts to do this bring them into conflict with LifeFarm, a monolithic American corporation intent on taking over the planet’s entire food production, and, with powerful influence in the US Congress, the military and the national security agencies will stop at nothing to achieve their aims. In a fast-paced narrative full of hair-raising car chases, nail-biting escapades and surprising plot twists, Javier joins with like-minded individuals to try to end the stranglehold that LifeFarm has insidiously developed on virtually all aspects of US life - a perilous journey where some will die in a desperate battle that is by no means certain of success.

I was initially sceptical of the concepts explored in The Seventh Seed - the thought of a large corporation having the level of influence and control over a huge nation like the USA seemed rather far-fetched. That is until I started to think about the sort of influence that the NRA has on the US Congress, how aggressively companies like Apple, Walmart and Google seek to manipulate, control and corner markets, how intelligent algorithms are mining the internet for ever more detailed information about us - information valuable to governments and corporations alike. In the end, I had to accept that the basic premise of this novel is at the very least credible. As Allison Maruska has included many twists and surprises in her plotline, I have refrained from providing a very detailed description of the narrative, but can perhaps observe that the final phase of Javier’s adventure is intelligently handled. In all, an interesting, thought-provoking book.