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Una marea gigante de agua contaminada amenaza la costa de Nicaragua. Al tiempo, un enorme y misterioso huracán se forma en el Caribe y avanza con una velocidad asombrosa.

En su camino se encuentra un barco de cruceros, de dimensiones nunca vistas. La muerte amenaza a un número incalculable de personas. Dirk Pitt, su hijo y Al Giordano acuden a rescatarles, pero cuando lo han hecho descubren algo aterrador, que supone una amenaza para toda la humanidad. Dispondrán de pocos días para detener una catástrofe que puede cambiar el mundo para siempre.

La odisea de Troya es una aventura grandiosa, una muestra más del talento excepcional de un maestro del género.

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The master of the medical thriller returns with his most heart-pounding tale yet.

Twenty-eight-year-old Sean McGillin is the picture of health, until he fractures his leg while in-line skating in New York City 's Central Park. Within twenty-four hours of his surgery, he dies.

A thirty-six-year-old mother, Darlene Morgan, has knee surgery to repair a torn ligament in her knee. And within twenty-four hours, she has died.

New York City medical examiners Dr. Laurie Montgomery and Dr. Jack Stapleton are back, in Robin Cook's electrifying twenty-fifth novel. Last seen in Vector, the doctors confront a series of puzzling hospital deaths of young, healthy people after successful routine surgery.

Despite institutional resistance from her superiors, as well as from those at Manhattan General, Laurie doggedly pursues the investigation. Though it seems impossible to determine why and how the patients are dying, she comes to suspect that not only are the deaths related-they're intentional, suggesting the work of a remarkably clever serial killer with a very unusual motive, involving frightening ties to both developing genomic medicine and the economics of modern-day health care.

Then Laurie is dealt a double blow: While coping with Jack's inability to commit to their relationship, she discovers she carries a genetic marker for a breast-cancer gene. As her personal life continues to unravel, the need for answers becomes more urgent, especially when Laurie is pulled into the nightmare as a potential victim herself. With time winding down, she and Jack race to connect the dots-and save Laurie's life.

With his signature blend of suspense and science, Robin Cook delivers an electrifying page-turner as vivid as today's headlines.

From Publishers Weekly

If Cook's skills as a writer were as finely tuned as his sense of timing, his 14th medical thriller (after Terminal) would be a lot more rewarding. Current political events guarantee that a suspense novel centering on health care management will be topical and at least potentially fascinating. Unfortunately, stock characters, stilted dialogue and improbable heroes and villains make for difficult reading here. Idealistic young doctors David and Angela Wilson take positions at a state-of-the-art medical center in a small Vermont town partly because they see it as an ideal spot for their daughter, who suffers from cystic fibrosis. But the town is not as idyllic as it seems, and the hospital is in a desperate financial bind due primarily to its contract with a local HMO, David's new employer. Worse still, patients are dying unexpectedly almost daily, and no one seems to care very much. The deaths are not normal, of course, and astute readers will quickly determine who is behind them, why and-most likely-how. Cook raises troubling questions about the conflicts between medical and financial priorities in managed care (albeit in a somewhat distorted fashion), but it's difficult to get emotionally involved in a scenario as improbable as this one. Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club main selection; Mystery Guild alternate; Reader's Digest Condensed Book.

From Library Journal

Recent medical school graduates David and Angela Wilson find the perfect setting for both their careers and family in rural Bartlet, Vermont. Not even the recent suicide and disappearance of two other physicians dampen their enthusiasm as they begin their jobs and buy their dream house. David's confidence is soon shaken, however, as his patients begin dying-not from their terminal diseases but from a mysterious illness. The deaths, coupled with attacks in the hospital parking lot, give the Wilsons the uneasy feeling that Bartlet is not what it seems. When a gruesome discovery prompts the Wilsons to hire a private investigator, the lives of several patients-and they themselves-are in danger. Physician and writer Cook once again terrifies and intrigues with this realistic and intense-to-the-end thriller, which is enhanced by actor Barry Bostwick's remarkable range of voices. For most popular collections.

Cutting-edge technology and personal greed converge in this spine-tingling novel of medicine run amok. Deborah Cochrane and Joanna Meissner, students and close friends, spot a campus newspaper ad that promises to solve their financial problems: an exclusive, highly profitable fertility clinic on Boston's North Shore is looking for donors. Deborah and Joanna figure they can perform a good deed in helping infertle couples, while earning some money for themselves. Although rumours Surface of a fellow donor's unexplained disappearance, they remain undeterred. The procedures seem to go smoothly, but second thoughts and curiosity prompt the two women discover more, Stymied by the clinic's veil of secrecy, Deborah and Joanna obtain employment there to continue their probe. Working under aliases, they soon discover the horrifying true aims of Dr Windgate's research, immediately putting their lives – and their sanity – irrevocably at risk.<

With billions of dollars at stake, every scientist in America is fighting to discover the next Prozac, the latest "feel good" drug. Using bacterial mould first uncovered during the Salem witch trials, Edward Armstrong isolates a stunningly effective anti-depressant.<

Did Grace Peltier commit suicide? When a mass grave in northern Maine reveals the final resting place of a religious community that disappeared almost forty years earlier, private detective Charlie Parker, hired to investigate the circumstances of her death, realises that their deaths and the violent passing of Grace Peltier are part of the same mystery, one that has its roots in her family history and in the origins of the shadowy organisation known as the Fellowship. Aided by the genial killers Angel and Louis, Parker must descend into the depths of a honeycomb world populated by dark angels and lost souls, a world where the ghosts of the dead wait for justice and the unwary are prey for the worst kind of creatures. The killing kind…<

In South Carolina, a young black man faces the death penalty for the rape and murder of Marianne Larousse, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in the state. It's a case that nobody wants to touch, a case with its roots in old evil, and old evil is private detective Charlie Parker's speciality. But Parker is about to make a descent into the abyss, a confrontation with dark forces that threaten all that Parker holds dear: his lover, his unborn child, even his soul… For in a prison cell, a fanatical preacher is about to take his revenge on Charlie Parker, its instruments the very men that Parker is hunting, and a strange, hunched creature that keeps its own secrets buried by a riverbank: the undiscovered killer Cyrus Nairn. Soon, all of these figures will face a final reckoning in southern swamps and northern forests, in distant locations linked by a single thread, a place where the paths of the living and the dead converge. A place known only as the White Road.<

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, prose magician Michael Chabon conjured up the golden age of comic books – intertwining history, legend, and storytelling verve. In The Final Solution, he has condensed his boundless vision to craft a short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story.

In deep retirement in the English country-side, an eighty-nine-year-old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot. What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out – a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case – the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot – beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth?

Subtle revelations lead the reader to a wrenching resolution. This brilliant homage, which won the 2004 Aga Khan Prize for fiction, is the work of a master storyteller at the height of his powers.

Michael Connelly returns with a new character and a story that reaches new levels of intricacy and suspense-his most gripping work to date.

Thanks to a heart transplant, retired Los Angeles -based FBI agent Terrell McCaleb has a new lease on life. Formerly a well-known media fixture as pointman for the bureau in the investigation of serial killers, he leads a quiet life now, spending his time renovating the fishing boat he lives on in the Los Angeles Harbor. His goal is simple-to finish restoring his houseboat and return to his home town on Catalina Island. But McCaleb’s calm seas turn choppy when a story in the “What Happened To?” column of the L.A. Times brings him face to face with the sister of the woman whose heart now beats in his chest. From her McCaleb learns a terrible truth: that the donor of his heart was not killed in an accident as he’d been told, but was murdered. Racked with the guilt of having lived because of someone else’s murder, McCaleb springs into action. Using his FBI connections and his expertise in crime scene interpretation, he embarks on a private investigation of his donor’s murder-a search leading him to a crime far more complex, and far more dangerous than he’d imagined. In BLOOD WORK, Michael Connelly is at the top of his game-delivering his most ambitious thriller yet.

RAVES FOR BLOOD WORK AND SUSPENSE MASTER MICHAEL CONNELLY

“RECALLS NO ONE SO MUCH AS RAYMOND CHANDLER… CONNELLY PUTS HIS FOOT ON THE GAS AND DOESN’T LET UP.” – Los Angeles Times

“A richly detailed and totally absorbing thriller… distinguished by its finely etched characters, relentless pacing, and spot-on depictions of the diversity of life in today’s L.A… BE PREPARED TO READ THIS ONE STRAIGHT THROUGH. IT’S THAT GOOD.” – Chicago Tribune

“CONNELLY IS ONE OF THOSE MASTERS OF STRUCTURE WHO CAN KEEP DRIVING THE STORY FORWARD, PARAGRAPH BY PARAGRAPH, IN RUNAWAY-LOCOMOTIVE STYLE.” – USA Today

“BEAUTIFULLY CONSTRUCTED, POWERFULLY RESONATING…Fans of Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will feel right at home with this thriller, and newcomers will see right away what all the fuss has been about.” – Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

“A WONDERFULLY TAUT READ.” – Washington Post Book World

“BLOOD WORK IS FIRST RATE… CONNELLY IS ONE OF THE BEST OF THE NEW BREED OF THRILLER WRITERS. His latest is as good as hisTrunk Music andThe Poet .” – San Francisco Examiner

“CONNELLY DOESN’T JUST TALK ABOUT POETS, HE WRITES LIKE ONE.” – People

“POWERFUL STORYTELLING AND WRITING SKILLS.” – Houston Chronicles

“CONNELLY’S PLOTTING IS NEAR FLAWLESS.” – Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel

“CONVINCINGLY CHOREOGRAPHED, and the procedural details of his casework fascinate.” – Wall Street journal

“Connelly should hit it big and reach the large audience who gleefully submitted themselves to the horrors of Thomas Harris’sRed Dragon andThe Silence of the Lambs .” – Booklist

From Kirkus Reviews

Second tense, tightly wound tangle of a case for Hieronymous Bosch (The Black Echo, 1991). This time out, the LAPD homicide cop, who's been exiled to Hollywood Division for his bumptious behavior, sniffs out the bloody trail of the designer drug ``black ice.'' Connelly (who covers crime for the Los Angeles Times) again flexes his knowledge of cop ways-and of cop-novel clich‚s. Cast from the hoary mold of the maverick cop, Bosch pushes his way onto the story's core case-the apparent suicide of a narc-despite warnings by top brass to lay off. Meanwhile, Bosch's boss, a prototypical pencil-pushing bureaucrat hoping to close out a majority of Hollywood 's murder cases by New Year's Day, a week hence, assigns the detective a pile of open cases belonging to a useless drunk, Lou Porter. One of the cases, the slaying of an unidentified Hispanic, seems to tie in to the death of the narc, which Bosch begins to read as murder stemming from the narc's dirty involvement in black ice. When Porter is murdered shortly after Bosch speaks to him, and then the detective's love affair with an ambitious pathologist crashes, Bosch decides to head for Mexico, where clues to all three murders point. There, the well-oiled, ten- gear narrative really picks up speed as Bosch duels with corrupt cops; attends the bullfights; breaks into a fly-breeding lab that's the distribution center for Mexico's black-ice kingpin; and takes part in a raid on the kingpin's ranch that concludes with Bosch waving his jacket like a matador's cape at a killer bull on the rampage. But the kingpin escapes, leading to a not wholly unexpected twist-and to a touching assignation with the dead narc's widow. Expertly told, and involving enough-but lacking the sheer artistry and heart-clutching thrills of, say, David Lindsay's comparable Stuart Haydon series (Body of Evidence, etc.).

Detective Harry Bosch reopens one of his own unsolved cases and comes face to face with a psychotic killer he has been seeking for years. A thrilling new novel by the author of the #1 bestseller The Lincoln Lawyer. In 1995 Marie Gesto disappeared after walking out of a supermarket. Harry Bosch worked the case but couldn't crack it, and the 22-year-old woman was never found. Now Bosch is in the Open-Unsolved Unit, where he still keeps the Gesto file on his desk, when the DA calls. A man accused of two heinous killings is willing to come clean about several others, including the murder of Marie Gesto. Bosch must now take the confession of the man he has sought-and hated-for eleven years. But when Bosch learns that he and his partner missed a clue back in 1995 that could have led them to Gesto's killer-and stopped nine murders that followed-his whole being as a cop begins to crack. Michael Connelly's enthralling new novel pits the detective People magazine calls "one of the most complex crime fighters around" against one of the most sadistic killers he has ever confronted. It confirms that Michael Connelly "is the best writer of suspense fiction working today"<

Amazon.com Review

Just when you thought it was safe to eat a hamburger again, Robin Cook – master of medical mysteries, deadly epidemics, and creepy comas-returns with an all too likely villain drawn right from current headlines: the American meat industry. If you've ever wondered where the E. coli bacteria comes from, and exactly how it can ravage the human body, destroying everything in its path, this is the book for you. As usual, Cook delivers solid information, well-researched medical arcana, and a scathing indictment of managed health care.

His protagonist, Kim Regis, is an all-too-typical ego-driven surgeon, whose arrogance and invulnerability set him up to be brought low by the deadly toxin that takes the life of his young daughter. Sparing no time and barely a paragraph to reflect on his loss, Regis goes right after the culprit, a meat-packing behemoth that brings dead and diseased animals to the slaughterhouse, breaking every health regulation in the book. The scenes set on the killing floor and in the boning rooms will make a vegetarian out of the most confirmed red-meat eater. Toxin is a heart-pounding thriller that hits very close to home.

The corpse in the hotel room appears to be that of a missing LAPD narcotics officer. Rumours abound that he had crossed selling a new drug called Black Ice from Mexico and the LAPD brass are quick to declare his death aside. But Harry Bosch isn't so sure; prompted by odd, inexplicable details from the crime scene, and attraction to the widow, he begins his own investigation. An investigation that takes him over the border to Mexico and into a dangerous labyrinth of shifting identities and deadly corruption.<

From Publishers Weekly

There's a gravitas to the mystery/thrillers of Michael Connelly, a bedrock commitment to the value of human life and the need for law enforcement pros to defend that value, that sets his work apart and above that of many of his contemporaries. That gravitas is in full force in Connelly's newest, and as nearly always in the work of this talented writer, it supports a dynamite plot, fully flowered characters and a meticulous attention to the details of investigative procedure.There are also some nifty hooks to this new Connelly: it features his most popular series character, retired L.A. homicide cop Harry Bosch, but it's also a sequel to his first stand-alone, The Poet (1996), and is only his second novel (along with The Poet) to be written in both first and third person. The first-person sections are narrated by Bosch, who agrees as a favor to the widow to investigate the death of Bosch's erstwhile colleague and friend Terry McCaleb (of Blood Work and A Darkness More Than Night). Bosch's digging brings him into contact with Rachel Walling, the FBI agent heroine of The Poet, and the third-person narrative concerns mostly her. Though generally presumed dead, the Poet-the serial killer who was a highly placed Fed and Walling's mentor-is alive and killing anew, with, we soon learn, McCaleb among his victims and his sights now set on Walling. The story shuttles between Bosch's California and the Nevada desert, where the Poet has buried his victims to lure Walling. The suspense is steady throughout but, until a breathtaking climactic chase, arises more from Bosch and Walling's patient and inspired following of clues and dealing with bureaucratic obstacles than from slash-and-dash: an unusually intelligent approach to generating thrills. Connelly is a master and this novel is yet another of his masterpieces.

From Publishers Weekly

"Sexuality has never been a problem with me. My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age." Despite this claim, the protagonist of Ran's unusual coming-of-age novel is defined by her precocious beauty and her struggle to define her sexual identity. Ran, one of China's most acclaimed contemporary women writers, tells how lovely Ni Niuniu is seduced before she enters puberty by an older woman, the sly, wise Widow Ho, then falls into an unwanted affair with her male teacher, Ti. In college, she meets the love of her life, a fellow student named Yin Nan, but their brief, passionate affair ends abruptly when Yin Nan becomes involved in the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Traumatized by the loss of Yin Nan and the deaths of her mother and Widow Ho, Niuniu retreats into her own mind, becoming Miss Nothing ("I no longer exist… I have disappeared…"). Niuniu's flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study. Even the more conventional scenes are narrated with lyrical intensity, and hallucinatory dream sequences and passages describing Niuniu's alienation range from the revelatory to the overwrought. The result is an uneven but intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space.

From Booklist

The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen. As a child, sensitive and gawky Ni Niuniu never quite fit in. Teased by her classmates and neglected by her cold, distant father, she engaged in quiet forms of rebellion (she once stole her father's woolen trousers and cut them off at the knees). While her father scarcely acknowledged her, other adults paid Ni Niuniu too much mind: her middle-school teacher, Ti, and an eccentric widower who lived next door each took sexual advantage of the impressionable young girl. Haunted by the past and despondent over the recent death of her mother and departure of her first love, Ni Niuniu retreats from the realities of politically charged Beijing, writing and drawing and endlessly soaking in her tub. Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world.

***

"Chen Ran's strikingly introspective, subjective, and individualized writing sets her work distinctively apart for the traditional and mainstream realism of the majority of contemporary Chinese writers… In his translation, Howard-Gibbon adeptly conveys the exquisiteness, richness, and slight eccentricity of Chen's prose." – China Daily

"The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous, coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen… Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world." – Booklist

"An intriguing exploration of the contemporary consciousness of an alienated, urban Chinese woman for whom current history matters less than the reliable comforts of love, nature, and solitude." – Kirkus Reviews

"Niuniu's flaws, foibles, and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study… [an] intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space." – Publishers Weekly

"In the novel A Private Life, Ran Chen immerses us in the troubled life of Ni Niuniu… Chen weaves together these evaluations with Niuniu's manic writings in order to create an ultra postmodern tale of a young woman's psychosocial evolution… an important portrait of a young woman trying to survive in a complicated world." – Bust Magazine

"A Private Life is not an overtly political book; rather, it has the timeless quality of most dreams. Still, [narrator] Ni Niuniu's refusal to connect with the world outside her door becomes a kind of political statement." – Elizabeth Gold, Washington Post

"An atmospheric story of sexual awakening and ennui that enlarges our understanding of modern China." – Vancouver Sun

"Niuniu's hatred of the few powerful males in her life and her sexual confusion and manipulations are clearly depicted." – Sofia A. Tangalos, Library Journal

"This polished and readable translation of the inaugural novel of Chen Ran stands as an example of the quasi-autobiographical Sino-Japanese shishosetsu" – Choice

"A riveting tale… a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity." – Translation Review

"A Private Life shows Chen Ran at her best: weaving together the female bildungsroman and social and political satire, she effortlessly flits from outbursts of rage to ecstasy to rarefied emotions. Her philosophical musings on the difficulty of achieving individual freedom are as critical of the collective pursuit of wealth and sensorial pleasures in China after socialism as of the authoritarianism and ideological conformity during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. The poignant, tragic-comic tale is ultimately about bondage and transcendence." – Tze-Lan D. Sang, author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China

"The novel daringly depicts a woman's emotional journey towards the maturation of her sexuality. It is a provocative reflection of the new sensibility of a young generation of Chinese women in the post-Deng era. Chen Ran's sensuous style easily breathes through the translator's English rendition of her language." – Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis

"One of the most acclaimed women writers in contemporary China, Chen Ran in this novel explores the complex emotional territory of the female body, sexuality, homoeroticism, and fantasy. The author’s personal voice triumphs in the novel as a most conscious presence, dissolving the public and collective model of socialist literature. Daringly written and excellently translated, A Private Life not only entertains, but also leaves the reader pondering Chen’s disturbing and deeply personal message." – Lingzhen Wang, Brown University

Amazon.co.uk Review

In this latest novel from the poet laureate of Gen X—who is himself now a dangerously mature 36—boy does indeed meet girl. The year is 1979, and the lovers get right down to business in a very Couplandian bit of plein air intercourse: "Karen and I deflowered each other atop Grouse Mountain, among the cedars beside a ski slope, atop crystal snow shards beneath penlight stars. It was a December night so cold and clear that the air felt like the air of the Moon—lung-burning; mentholated and pure; hint of ozone, zinc, ski wax, and Karen's strawberry shampoo." Are we in for an archetypal '80s romance, played out against a pop-cultural backdrop? Nope. Only hours after losing her virginity, Karen loses consciousness as well—for almost two decades. The narrator and his circle soldier on, making the slow progression from debauched Vancouver youths to semi-responsible adults. Several end up working on a television series that bears a suspicious resemblance to The X-Files (surely a self-referential wink on the author's part). And then … Karen wakes up. Her astonishment— which suggests a 20th-century, substance-abusing Rip Van Winkle—dominates the second half of the novel, and gives Coupland free reign to muse about time, identity, and the meaning (if any) of the impending millennium. Alas, he also slaps a concluding apocalypse onto the novel. As sleeping sickness overwhelms the populace, the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but a universal yawn—which doesn't, fortunately, outweigh the sweetness, oddity, and ironic smarts of everything that has preceded it. —This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Synopsis

Girls, memory, parenting, millennial fear — all served Coupland-style. Karen, an attractive, popular student, goes into a coma one night in 1979. Whilst in it, she gives birth to a healthy baby daughter; once out of it, a mere eighteen years later, she finds herself, Rip van Winkle-like, a middle-aged mother whose friends have all gone through all the normal marital, social and political traumas and back again…This tragicomedy shows Coupland in his most mature form yet, writing with all his customary powers of acute observation, but turning his attention away from the surface of modern life to the dynamics of modern relationships, but doing so with all the sly wit and weird accuracy we expect of the soothsaying author of Generation X, Shampoo Planet, Life After God, Microserfs and Polaroids from the Dead.

From Amazon.com

Considering some of his past subjects--slackers, dot-commers, Hollywood producers--a Columbine-like high school massacre seems like unusual territory for the usually glib Douglas Coupland. Anyone who has read Generation X or Miss Wyoming knows that dryly hip humor, not tragedy, is the Vancouver author's strong suit. But give Coupland credit for twisting his material in strange, unexpected shapes. Coupland begins his seventh novel by transposing the Columbine incident to North Vancouver circa 1988. Narrated by one of the murdered victims, the first part of Hey Nostradamus! is affecting and emotional enough to almost make you forget you're reading a book by the same writer who so accurately characterized a generation in his first book, yet was unable to delineate a convincing character. As Cheryl Anway tells her story, the facts of the Delbrook Senior Secondary student's life--particularly her secret marriage to classmate Jason--provide a very human dimension to the bloody denouement that will change hundreds of lives forever. Rather than moving on to explore the conditions that led to the killings, though, Coupland shifts focus to nearly a dozen years after the event: first to Jason, still shattered by the death of his teenage bride, then to Jason's new girlfriend Heather, and finally to Reg, Jason's narrow-minded, religious father.

Hey Nostradamus! is a very odd book. It's among Coupland's most serious efforts, yet his intent is not entirely clear. Certainly there is no attempt at psychological insight into the killers' motives, and the most developed relationships--those between Jason and Cheryl, and Jason and Reg--seem to have little to do with each other. Nevertheless, it is a Douglas Coupland book, which means imaginatively strange plot developments--as when a psychic, claiming messages from the beyond, tries to extort money from Heather--that compel the reader to see the story to its end. And clever turns of phrase, as usual, are never in short supply, but in Cheryl's section the fate we (and she) know awaits her gives them an added weight: "Math class was x's and y's and I felt trapped inside a repeating dream, staring at these two evil little letters who tormented me with their constant need to balance and be equal with each other," says the deceased narrator. "They should just get married and form a new letter together and put an end to all the nonsense. And then they should have kids." --Shawn Conner, Amazon.ca

From Publishers Weekly

Coupland has long been a genre unto himself, and his latest novel fits the familiar template: earnest sentiment tempered by sardonic humor and sharp cultural observation. The book begins with a Columbine-like shooting at a Vancouver high school, viewed from the dual perspectives of seniors Jason Klaasen and Cheryl Anway. Jason and Cheryl have been secretly married for six weeks, and on the morning of the shooting, Cheryl tells Jason she is pregnant. Their situation is complicated by their startlingly deep religious faith (as Cheryl puts it, "I can't help but wonder if the other girls thought I used God as an excuse to hook up with Jason"), and their increasingly acrimonious relationship with a hard-core Christian group called Youth Alive! After Cheryl is gunned down, Jason manages to stop the shooters, killing one of them. He is first hailed as a hero, but media spin soon casts him in a different light. This is a promising beginning, but the novel unravels when Jason reappears as an adult and begins an odd, stilted relationship with Heather, a quirky court reporter. Jason disappears shortly after their relationship begins, and Heather turns to a psychic named Allison to track him down in a subplot that meanders and flags. Coupland's insight into the claustrophobic world of devout faith is impressive-one of his more unexpected characters is Jason's father, a pious, crusty villain who gradually morphs into a sympathetic figure-but when he extends his spiritual explorations to encompass psychic swindles, the novel loses its focus. Coupland has always been better at comic set pieces than consistent storytelling, and his lack of narrative control is particularly evident here. Noninitiates are unlikely to be seduced, but true believers will relish another plunge into Coupland-world.