In this recounting of medical and human history, Marriott takes us back to Hong Kong in the summer of 1894, when a diagnosis of plague brought two top scientists to the island--Alexandre Yersin, a lone, maverick French bacteriologist, and his eminent rival, the Japanese Shibasaburo Kitasato. Marriott interweaves his narrative of their competition to discover the plague's source with scenes of the scourge's persistence: California in 1900, when plague arrived in the United States; Surat, India, in 1994, where torrential floods drowned millions of rats, causing the worst outbreak in seventy years; and New York City, some time in the future, where there is a rat for every human being, a diminishing budget for pest control, and an emerging strain of plague that is resistant to antibiotics.--From publisher description.