The I.F. Zones

Colonel Lucy Topp is a top flight virus hunter for the army who prefers the isolation of the great outdoors to the hustle and bustle of a lab.

But when clusters of people start dying, apparently un-connected to one another (the mysterious proliferation of isolated fatality zones), Lucy is forced to collaborate to thwart a rapidly escalating pandemic.

With the only symptoms being corpses with an eerie tight smile, it takes an unlikely partner in the form of the enigmatic Hiroshi Sugimura to unlock the puzzle.

Can Lucy see what is right in front of her in a new light? If so, she might even find something she wasn't looking for!

The I.F. Zones is a heart-pounding technothriller that twists and turns from the Japanese forests in Hoakaido to a biotech facility in Kazakhstan, from piggeries in China to the CDC in Atlanta.

Rufus Williams was born in Australia and earned a PhD in Number Theory at Harvard University. Subsequently he wrote and directed a feature film loosely based on the Chinese philosopher Chang Tzu's famous butterfly dream. His father, Keith Williams, is a biologist who worked at Oxford University and the Max Planck Institute in Munich, before returning to Australia. He went on to found the biotech company Proteome Systems, named after the ground-breaking research he spearheaded in his lab that coined the term proteomics.

Together, father and son collaborated on the story behind The I.F. Zones to bring you a thought-provoking novel grounded in real science. Rufus took that framework and brought it to life with characters led by Lucy Topp, who like Rufus enjoys climbing; though unlike Rufus-who loves natural rocks-Lucy's favored environment is the wilds of treetops.