Stranger Inside

From the author of The Omega Game...
There's something inside Jimmy-and it's burning to get out...

For five years, Nate Adriano has been on the most bizarre case he's ever encountered, a situation hidden by the government. Fifteen teenagers have died, seemingly from internally generated fires. But one teenager, Jimmy Somerset has all the symptoms, yet has defied the odds-and may hold the answer to what exactly is inside.

It isn't immediately clear what the connection is between Nate Adriano, who is investigating several teens' inexplicable deaths, and a teenager with problems neither he nor anyone else quite understands. But eventually Nate, aided by records leaked from the top-secret government agency seeking answers to the same questions, is led to Jimmy, who has finally been dumped from foster care and into a program called TRACE, which ostensibly is going to help him control his outbursts of violence. Matters come to a head in a confrontation between security-obsessed government forces, Nate on his quest for the truth, and Jimmy with his desire to deal with his mental turmoil. Aside from obliquely addressing such issues as free speech and "homeland security," what Krane's well-paced tale develops into is pretty classy alien-invasion fare. Well, not quite invasion, but a form of exploration that is subtler and, in the long run, far more interesting. Regina Schroeder
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