For a good, prescient, scary read, pick up Stinger by Nancy Kress, filed in "SF" in some bookstores, in "Thrillers" in others and in "Fiction" in still others.

Scenario: A car driving through Southern Maryland late at night hits a deer and spins out into a tree. Something in the trunk gets loose. In the next few weeks, all of a sudden, the incidence of fatal strokes in African Americans in Southern MD starts climbing, and seems to be hitting sickle-cell carriers. A black presidential candidate drops dead at an important speech.

The public demands an investigation of this new, possibly genetically engineered bioterrorism strain of malaria, and the government sends in the CDC and FBI to "investigate", but the FBI agent in charge and one CDC doctor find there are all sorts of people who don't want this investigation to go too deep. The FBI profiles a likely terrorist archetype that sounds EXACTLY like their description of the "UNATHRAXER". There are other parallels to current events involving gov't. agency turf battles, political manipulation of data, etc. that are rather scarier in today's climate than when I first read the book last year...

As a biologist and geneticist, I enjoy Nancy Kress's science fiction - she tackles biological scenarios that aren't too far-fetched.