Review: Really great science fiction and police procedural rolled into one
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 29, 2012
I really enjoyed this book, and it is a fast read. It starts out with a very likeable character, Emmett, an older, African-American man who owns a farm in a time and a place where that didn't happen very often. When a crime is committed on his land, he is forced to cover it up because of who and what he is to the other ranchers, but it haunts him until the day he dies, and pretty much tears his family apart. The story starts there, but then fast-forwards about forty-odd years to his nephew, who is a NYC beat cop and a lot more affected by those past events than he knows. What follows from there is one of the most intriguing plot lines I've read in a long time...it reminded me of "They Live," a movie I really loved when I was younger, only without the dark humor of that movie. Instead it carries a far more serious tone, one somewhere between the X-Files and a police procedural. Simms, the main character, has a pretty normal life for a cop, until one day he is kidnapped by a bizarre and seemingly scientist who tells him a fantastical story about a conspiracy threatening to annihilate the human race. In the process of his kidnapping, the scientist shoots Simms up with a substance that he claims will allow him to see the "truth." After that, Simms' life is never the same...as a reader you're put through the wringer with him as he starts seeing things he can't explain, ends up in a mental institution and then on the run, all the while caught up in a conspiracy whose players he can only guess at, some of whom appear to be friends he's known and trusted for years. If I had any gripe at all (and it's a small one), it was only that it ended a little abruptly, and I would have liked more regarding the final payoff where the reader finally learns the true extent of what's going on and Simms' connection to all of it. But I really hope Lorde is planning a sequel, because I definitely want to read that book! Strong recommend.