The Plot to Destroy America

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America’s leaders and pundits have long warned that China is the West’s greatest threat to its democratic and economic survival. This is the central theme upon which Barry Libin’s newest novel, The Red Mutation, is based.                                                               

The Red Mutation is a geopolitical thriller that discloses the Chinese use of bioterror to achieve world domination. When the head of China’s Hunan Institute of Virology bioengineers a Covid-like virus mutation that kills an entire village with a single nanoparticle, China’s leaders believe they have created the perfect assassin: hidden, silent, and deadly. Indeed, the most powerful weapon ever devised by man.

The name of the mutation is Thanatos, the Greek god of merciless death, and it is adopted as the central tenet of China's New Defense Policy. But although Chinese scientists have proved Thanatos absolutely deadly, they have not yet found the antidote to control it, without which China’s policy cannot succeed.

Dr. Jeffrey Moss of the NYPD believes there is a brilliant young scientist working at the Brookfield Institute in New York that is close to finding the antidote but has disappeared. From the streets of Shanghai to the avenues of Manhattan, Moss and his colleagues must find the young man and prevent Chinese agents from kidnapping him, allowing the antidote from falling into the wrong hands. If Moss is unable to accomplish his mission in time, then Thanatos will be released, and the world will fall hostage to its enemies.

WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING

“Barry Libin's The Red Mutation is a tour de force that reflects the new geopolitical reality that China will assert its role in the world by any means necessary.”—Claude Berube, PhD, Former Executive Director, U.S. Naval Academy Museum, and author of The Philippine Pact and Connor Stark novels. 

“The Red Mutation IS a thriller that keeps one reading from beginning to end, not only due to its literary style but to a plot that makes it difficult to differentiate between the fiction and the reality. Libin raises a serious  concern: how does the civilized world counter the aggression of those nations that will do anything to gain global supremacy.”—Stephane Allard, MD, PhD has been a leader in pharmaceutical research for over forty years for some of the most prestigious Pharmaceutical Companies in the world.

“Barry Libin’s newest novel delves deep into the treacherous landscape of old-school international politics and advanced bioterrorism to deliver a frightening vision of what was and what could be. This fast-paced thriller takes the reader on an action-filled adventure that crisscrosses the globe, exposing the dark underbelly of scientific ambition and the precarious balance between salvation and catastrophe. It’s an unpredictable journey, where plot twists keep you guessing until the very end.”—Steven Piskula is an award-winning screenwriter, former journalist and author of The First Harm, Winner of Best Medical Thriller, Independent Press Award 2023.   

"'At first he appeared to be a hiker' . . . so begins Barry Libin's latest novel, on a notably allegorical tone that appropriately opens a must-read work. If this unique book can be contained by any genre, it would have to be considered science-fiction as Jules Verne, the genre's originator, intended it to be:  the history of the future . . . a creative expose of what can and will occur if we fail to accept the work's cautionary fable element and in so doing allow the predictions to become reality without attempting to negate them.  Libin asks the ultimate question of our own time: What if Covid were not some terrible quirk of nature but a consciously designed invisible weapon, brilliantly designed by a foreign power to destroy America? With his gift for literate and literary prose, Libin creates three dimensional characters – and a bold fiction that plays as if it were a documentary with a message that ought not to be ignored."—Douglas Brode, The Planet Jesus Trilogy, Patsy: The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald