When he first comes for Mary, she notices “his perfectly tailored jacket, his ivory white fingernails, his two polished shoes … as if he floated above the mud and shit that made up the streets of New York City, and never walked through it like the rest of them.” The questions he asks her make no sense all she hears is Soper telling her that she must never cook again for others, meaning that her life and livelihood as she has built them are now over. George Soper, the doctor who came up with the theory of an asymptomatic carrier, is very much the villain in this telling. And she believes that it is her perceived haughtiness, and not the disease she is suspected of carrying, that makes her a scapegoat when the members of families she has worked for begin to succumb to typhoid fever.

Proudly unconventional in her ambitions as well as her lifestyle - she never married Alfred Brierhof, the man she lived with for much of her adult life - Mary disdains the immigrant’s customary need to fit in. In Keane’s telling, Mary is indeed a unique heroine, for herself as much as for the time in which she lived. We experience her delight in her growing culinary skill. We feel the heroine’s determination to better herself.

Keane writes in the third person, but with a subtly handled partial omniscience into Mary’s thoughts and feelings. During those years the Irish immigrant Mary, having climbed the ladder of domestic service from laundress to the relatively prestigious position of cook, is pursued and quarantined for the first time, for a period of three years, by board of health officials. The bulk of the book is devoted to the most dramatic decade of Mallon’s life, from 1900 to 1910. But Keane makes up for this absence of events by narrowing both the narrative arc and the point of view in doing so, she crafts an absorbing and beautifully written novel. Mallon, born in 1869, spent nearly three decades of her 69 years in quarantine at the order of the New York Department of Health her life before and between these episodes was hard, but not especially harder than that of other female immigrants of the period.

For an author conjuring fiction from historical fact, perhaps the biggest challenge is this: how to sustain suspense when the reader already knows how the story will end? Mary Beth Keane solves this problem ingeniously in Fever, a novel based on the life of Mary Mallon, more commonly known as Typhoid Mary, or the first known asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.

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