Two years ago Dr. Stephen D. Ahearn is maneuvering the deep sea craft "Deep Flight IV" through the bowels of the Galapagos Rift when he has an accident and is trapped, and then. . .and then the story picks up two years later. How does this incident tie in with Tess Gerritsen's main story? Hey, read the story and find out, it does, Gerritsen isn't just wasting out time here. So, as we pick up the story, Emma Watson is in training to be an astronaut, and in the process is divorcing her husband Jack McCallum, ER doctor, and one time astronaut candidate, who unfortunately was washed out of the NASA's astronaut program because of a kidney stone. The story continues to introduce characters that will become important to the story, like Gordon Obie, the director of flight crew operations who is fighting the good fight to save the, never named, space station, and who is having to deal with a bunch of congressional d-baggers, luddites and chicken hawks; none of whom can see any worth to America's space program. Or, Sullivan Obie, Gordon's insecure, overachieving brother, who is trying to get some investors to infuse some cash into his crashing Apogee Engineering business. Sullivan is trying to get his new reusable launch vehicle, the Apogee II, um, off the ground. Then there is a huge multi-car pile-up, and when one of the orbiting astronaut's wives is seriously hurt, and slips into a coma, he has to come back to Earth, and it's up to Emma to take his place. Distracted, another astronaut makes a mistake with his experiments. The mice start dying, a scientist is bitten by an infected mouse, the scientist gets sick, and Helen Koenig, who is behind this scientist's experiments, is killed in an accident. Then the dying begins, and Emma's old training flight crew is sent up to get the body, but contamination occurs, and there's a storm coming that will complicate matters. And soon it is found out that the contamination is, well, it's alive, and it's evolving, and it's absorbing the DNA from those that it kills. Things go from bad, to worse, to hell in a handbasket as there is a shuttle crash, a crew dies, and the infection spreads. And then things get really bad and complicated, is bioterrorism involved? Tune in and find out. "Gravity" is a solidly told commercial science fiction thriller with some horror overtones. Honestly, I didn't expect much, but was pleasantly surprised by the nastiness of the contamination, and the refusing of Gerritsen to back away from the description of either the disease's symptoms or its effects. Yuck. Gerritsen was also good at creating Emma Watson, a character that most of us will be rooting for, and once the dying starts, we will wonder how Gerritsen will get Watson out of the mess that she's in, or if she will get out of it, as Gerritsen doesn't seem afraid to kill off major characters. Gerritsen is also very good at ratcheting up the suspense of her novel by having the disease continually evolve into something more and more nasty, as major characters die, and . Twists in the novel's the plot will continue to build the suspense even more, and they will become more and more important as this novel will soon split when the contagion starts, between being mostly told be either Emma in space, or her husband Jack, on the ground. On the other hand, there is some dead-end material here that does nothing but chew up the word count. First of all is the dopey love/lust stuff between two of the astronauts. Sex in outer space? Really, would any two astronauts really engage in anything so careless and so unprofessional? This is a plotline that does absolutely nothing to enhance the story, and which leads to a dopey scene later on. And then there's the whole congressional members thing. It enters the story merely as an excuse for Gerritsen to let loose a, deserved, rant against such congressional dunces, but really, in the end it comes, it goes, and it contributes nothing to the story. I wonder how this book would have read if it had been published by a smaller publishing house, because I thought that the ending would have been better if it had a harder, less romantic, edge. Really, this is commercial stuff, so we know how it will play out, even if we don't know exactly how. Still, in the end I'm giving this piece of commercial fiction four stars because I was never bored, and I was truly kept rapt by the last half of the novel. Unfortunately, while I read, and enjoyed, Wheeler's large-print edition, it was also stuck with a real turkey of a cover, and inanely forgettable book title. Still, I think that this novel would probably make a decent cable movie on something like the Scy-Fy channel.