What happens when people with the will and political power to depopulate the world actually get access to the technology it takes to do it?
In Patrick Lee's fast-paced new sci-fi novel, that's exactly what they do. A sequel to Lee's acclaimed "The Breach," "Ghost Country" explores how it's theoretically possible to induce such feelings of despair and desperation in people that they do what they're told without question or qualms.
When Paige Campbell, head of the supersecret Tangent project studying the existence of a kind of pipeline – a breach – to an alien world, discovers something distressing about the future, she leaves her associate, Bethany Stewart, in charge at the remote facility and takes one of the alien artifacts that has come through the breach on a trip to see the President of the United States. But when her car and its escorts are ambushed after the visit, and everyone in the convoy is apparently killed, Bethany Stewart takes an identical artifact and seeks out former Tangent researcher Travis Chase.
Having seen something so disconcerting in the breach that he couldn't deal with the knowledge, Chase wanted nothing more to do with the project. Even though he knew it made him a wanted man, he ran away and hid out in a series of cities and under a series of temporary identities. But Stewart finds him anyway, and draws him into the horrifying plot powerful people in government have cooked up.
When the two discover that Campbell is still alive, using the alien artifact Stewart managed to get away with – which allows them to travel back and forth seventy or so years into the future, to when the United States is a ghost country – they rescue her from the amazingly malevolent idealist she was turned over to after the ambush. But the bad guy has Campbell's artifact, and it has the same power of time travel.
If Campbell, Stewart and Chase fail, there will be nothing to stop the nightmare future those in power are determined to impose on the world.
Patrick Lee keeps the plot moving at a quick pace, and keeps up an action level most authors can't maintain to novel length. His scenarios are absolutely believable, and the images he conjures up – especially the epic wildfire that completely swallows up the remains of Yuma, Arizona – seem to put the reader right in the scene.
Can't wait to read the sequel!
Visit Patrick's website at http://www.patrickleefiction.com/ for more information on his books and upcoming projects!
My thanks to Harper Collins for the review copy of this book. We were not compensated for our opinions.
