Savage Blood

The gripping new thriller by the author of The Final Days.

The Island with No-Name, a four-day eastward sail from Chennai, and 170 miles west of the Ten Degree Channel, has been bypassed by the Age of Discovery. Unlike her equally beautiful sisters in the lush and tropical Apsaran archipelago, she lacked the natural resources to be considered worthy of exploitation by British or Indian colonizers, and is surrounded by a sparkling but impassable reef.

As a result, her inhabitants, the legendarily vicious and cannibalistic Lombe tribe, surrounded by their own mythology of disappearance and death, have been permitted to remain in the stone age, infiltrated by only the foolish, the mad, and the soon-to-be slaughtered.

Until now.

Ultimately threatened by the burgeoning requirements of new tourism possibilities in the Bay of Bengal, Edward Quinn, a shady American philanthropist, would seek to preserve the traditional tribal way of life by constructing an anthropological theme park on the island; an ecologically unique but morally dubious enterprise designed to permit the savages to exist in traditional fashion whilst under invisible scrutiny from wealthy and well-meaning environmental tourists.

Unfortunately for Quinn, the savages will have other ideas.

A rich and considered mix of Joseph Conrad and Michael Crichton, and crammed with the same fiendishly plotted incident that characterized Alex Chance's debut novel The Final Days, Savage Blood will define postcolonial horror.

ALEX CHANCE was born in 1979 in Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, and was educated in Nottinghamshire and at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He lives in West London.