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.
Paige Campbell, head of the super-secret Tangent
project studying the existence of a kind of pipeline or
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.
For decades, inexplicable technology has passed into our
world through the top secret anomaly called the Breach.
The latest device can punch a hole into the future . . .
What Paige Campbell saw when she opened a door into
seventy years from now scared the hell out of her. She and
her Tangent colleagues brought their terrible discovery to
the President—and were met with a hail of automatic
gunfire after leaving the White House. Only Paige
survived. Fearing a terrifying personal destiny revealed
to him from the other side of the Breach, Travis Chase
abandoned Tangent . . . and Paige Campbell. Now he must
rescue her—because Paige knows tomorrow’s world is
desolate and dead, a ghost country scattered with the
bones of billions. And Doomsday will dawn in just four
short months . . . unless they can find the answers buried
in the ruins to come. But once they cross the nightmare
border into Ghost Country, they might never find their way
back . . .
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