The Umbrella Conspiracy (Resident Evil, #1)

Raccoon City: a remote mountain community suddenly besieged by a rash of grisly murders encroaching upon it from the surrounding forest. Bizarre reports start to spread, describing attacks from vicious creatures, some human... some not. Victims are apparently eaten.

At the epicenter of these deaths is a dark, secluded mansion belonging to the mysterious Umbrella Corporation. For years umbrella has labored within the mansion, unwatched, ostensibly conducting benign genetic research.

Deployed to investigate the strange goings-on is the Special Tactics and Rescue Squad (S.T.A.R.S.), an unusual paramilitary response unit boasting an eclectic assortment of mission specialists: roguish Chris Redfield, former cat burglar Jill Valentine, dead-eye Barry Burton, and the enigmatic team leader, Albert Wesker. Together with the other S.T.A.R.S. operatives, they have a good reason to believe they're ready for anything.

But what unfolds as the S.T.A.R.S. penetrate the mansion's long-locked doors is terror beyond their worst nightmares: creatures that defy the laws of life and death—the result of forbidden experiments gone disastrously wrong. Behind it all is a conspiracy so vast in its scope and so insidious in its agenda that the S.T.A.R.S. will be betrayed from within to ensure that the world never learns Umbrella's secret. And if any survive... they may well come to envy those who did not.