Is this the next Stephen King?

FICTION

After burned-out infectious disease expert Lyle Martin is nudged awake by a nervous flight attendant in the early going of Matt Richtel’s debut novel, “Dead on Arrival,” he has a hard time grasping reality.

First, he is told that no one at the Steamboat Springs airport made radio contact with Delta Flight 194 as it began to land. Next, there is that person lying on the tarmac, apparently dead from unknown causes.

There are other seemingly dead people littered all over Steamboat, including all the airplane’s passengers. In fact, the only people left alive are those who were in the cockpit shortly after the airplane landed — Martin, Capt. Eleanor Hall, her overly protective co-pilot, and a mysterious and oddly helpful passenger.

Martin is asked to piece together the mystery. But to summon his courage, the full-fledged alcoholic must first guzzle through a few of those little in-flight booze bottles he stole from the airplane, a move that doesn’t inspire confidence among those he’s seemingly trying to save.

It’s a wonderfully confounding start to a book that has been compared to the works of Stephen King and Michael Crichton. Richtel, a Pulitizer Prizewinning New York Times reporter, knows his infectious diseases as well as the pitfalls of our reliance on modern social media technology.

That is a key component in the last half of the book.

Let’s just say all that texting and Googling could lead to the unraveling of our minds and the world as we know it. At least in Richtel’s book.

Richtel has also conjured a fascinating character in Martin, who at one time was considered the leading expert on the world’s most deadly viruses. But because of the weight of the job and a cheating spouse, he’s become a shell of the man he used to be.

Richtel tries to explain what led to Martin’s collapse and the reasons behind his trip to Steamboat through flashbacks. The trick can lead to confusion and throws off the book’s rhythm.

But Richtel ties it all together in the final pages. So much so, a reader is hopeful Martin will be back again, solving medical mysteries and saving mankind in the process.

Monte Whaley: 720-929-0907, mwhaley@denverpost.com or @montewhaley OFFICIAL TICKETS: