Spanogle, 35, is a third-year Stanford University medical student who grew up in York, Penn. with his parents reading books to him every night when he was a child.

"I penned a 10-page fantasy 'book' in fifth-grade and continued to write skits in high school," he said.

He took writing courses while in college and "after deciding on medicine, I discovered an environment in which I felt comfortable and in which I wanted to set a book."

"Isolation Ward" mixes a fast-moving raging virus with the bioethics of transplantation, stirs in a cocky, insubordinate medical investigator, and shakes the action between the east and west coasts for a well-blended first novel.

Dr. Nathaniel McCormick — a 30-something investigator from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta who has been working short-term in Baltimore — is confronted with a mysterious illness infecting mentally challenged young residents of Baltimore group homes.

The etiology of the illness is unknown, but it appears to be an extremely contagious viral hemorrhagic fever such as Ebola or Junin. McCormick's urgency in finding the virus "vector" — the person responsible for carrying the infection — is exacerbated by local health officials' reluctance to quarantine patients and close down hospitals.

McCormick is not really a sympathetic viewpoint character. He's abrupt, impulsive, and disinclined to share important info with other health officials and the police, who are called to the scene when one of the group-home residents is discovered dead, eviscerated, and hastily buried.

Due to his inability to make nice with the higher-ups, McCormick is booted out of Baltimore by his superior officer (the CDC is run on a quasi-military framework) and sent to San Francisco to check out a possible lead on the murder victim's past and identity, which are shrouded in questions.

But the Bay Area is the last place McCormick wants to be. A former M.D./Ph.D. student at Stanford, he was booted out of school for the unforgivable sin of cooking the data from his research project.

Through the good offices of his advisor, Dr. Harriet Tobel, the only person to stand behind him throughout the sordid episode, he was able to get his M.D. at University of Maryland after being suitably purged of his hubris by a stint in Peace Corps.

He hasn't been back to the Bay Area since the debacle, seeing as it littered with his mistakes, including an ex-girlfriend from his Stanford days and another from Atlanta who now lives in Santa Clara.

McCormick has to confront the Atlanta ex, Brooke Michaels, almost immediately, as she works for the county Health Department and has been alerted to his arrival by his long-suffering boss. But it's his Stanford girl, Alaine Chen, who really occupies his thoughts.

Visiting his one-time advisor, McCormick discovers that Chen is now working alongside Dr. Tobel in her lab, doing very important but hush-hush work funded by a biotechnology company. Though McCormick is still attracted to Chen, she makes it clear that she is happy with her current fiancé, Ian Carrigan, the venture capitalist behind the biotech company that funds her research.

Then people in the Bay Area begin dying in ways that are meant to imply suicide, but McCormick doesn't buy that, especially when one of those who dies is very important to him.

McCormick's wry, smart-ass persona can be appealing, and Spanogle gives him some funny situations amid the growing carnage. At one point, McCormick checks the rat traps at one of the group homes to see if the virus could be rodent-borne.

When he is challenged by a thug in the pay of the group home's shady operator, McCormick threatens the thug with the caged rat, which obligingly inflicts a flesh wound. Later, the thug complains to the police:

"'I want to press charges for assault,' he informed Officer Blakely.