Richard Preston is an American journalist and author born in 1954. His 1992 New Yorker article “Crisis in the Hot Zone” led to a bestselling book, The Hot Zone. The success of The Hot Zone led to a career writing both fiction and nonfiction about deadly diseases in a suspense-driven, popular style. He occasionally uses his journalistic skills to track down information, as when he finds the veterinarian who signed the export certificates for the monkeys that began the outbreak of the then-unknown filovirus in Marburg, Germany—someone the World Health Organization investigators failed to speak with.

Preston appears as a figure in the narrative most clearly in Part 4, where he makes his own expedition to Kitum Cave to see the place where Charles Monet and Peter Cardinal contracted Ebola. As he travels to Kenya for this quest, he reflects upon a childhood experience living on a farm in an unspecified place in Africa. In the process of researching and writing this book, he appears to develop a growing sense of alarm about the danger posed by