Part historical novel, part futuristic adventure … chock full of curious lore and considerable suspense. -Entertainment Weekly

It is history’s most feared disease. It turned neighbor against neighbor, the civilized into the savage, and the living into the dead. Now, in a spellbinding novel of adventure and science, romance and terror, two eras are joined by a single trace of microscopic bacterium-the invisible seeds of a new bubonic plague.

In the year 1348, a disgraced Spanish physician crosses a landscape of horrors to Avignon, France. There, he will be sent on an impossible mission to England, to save the royal family from the Black Death… .

Nearly seven hundred years later, a woman scientist digs up a clod of earth in London. In a world where medicine is tightly controlled, she will unearth a terror lying dormant for centuries.

From the primitive cures of the Middle Ages to the biological police state of our near future, The Plague Tales is a thrilling race against time and mass destruction. For in 2005, humankind’s last hope for survival can come only from one place: out of a dark and tortured past.

Praise for The Plague Tales

Benson reveals a formidable talent as she blends historical fiction with a near-future bio-thriller. -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Harrowing … Will give readers both nightmares and thrills … A carefully woven page-turner from which … Robin Cook and Michael Crichton could learn. -Library Journal

A hard-to-put-down thriller steeped in historical fiction and bio-tech sci-fi. -Middlesex News (Mass.)