David Koepp is the ninth most successful screenwriter of all time in terms of U.S. box office receipts with a total gross of over $2.3 billion. He wrote Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, and Mission: Impossible, but that’s not why I picked up his debut novel Cold Storage. I went looking for it after I listened to his novella Yard Work a speculative fiction story about refusing to give up just because you’re old and alone. I wanted to see what a man who could write a story like that would do with a thriller. 

The publisher’s summary for Cold Storage was so generic, I’d probably have passed over the book if I hadn’t already read Yard Work.

They thought it was contained. They were wrong.

After decades underground in a forgotten sub-basement, a highly mutative organism – capable of extinction-level destruction – has found its way out. Only Pentagon bioterror operative Roberto Diaz can stop it. With the help of two unwitting security guards, he has one night to quarantine this horror, before it destroys all of humanity.

The summary isn’t inaccurate but it leaves out everything that makes this book original and fun. 

Click here to read the rest of the review on my 2021 Halloween Bingo site