Unnatural Exposure marries the detective genre and the medical thriller. The harried efforts to isolate and counteract a new deadly infection appear in several novels, the most notable being one of the first in the genre, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton (1969; see separate entry). In the mid-1990s, interest in the topic of strange and dangerous viruses was fueled by The Hot Zone by Richard Preston (1994), the real-life chronicle of the 1989 incident in which an American team combatted a contagious African virus. Preston then wrote a novel, The Cobra Event (1997), about biological warfare.