Synopsis
When Arthur Banks stumbles upon mysterious and dangerous beings who have hidden their existence among ordinary human life, his peaceful life in San Francisco begins to disintegrate as he struggles to protect his family--and perhaps the entire human race--from the menace. 100,000 first printing.
Reviews
Veteran thriller-writer Robinson (The Towering Inferno; The Power) approaches the millennium at full strength with a truly frightening and plausible story about another species of human beings, in hiding for 35,000 years and now ready to take control of the planet. Dr. Lawrence Shea finds himself stalked from Berkeley to San Francisco, then killed by a brutal, secretive telepath. Shea was a member of the Suicide Club, a set of professionals who give informal lectures for one another. TV journalist Artie Banks, a club member, probes Shea's death and finds it extremely suspicious?especially after more doctors are killed. Other members of the club, as well as Artie's wife and disabled stepson, come under scrutiny as the facts about the secret species emerge. "Our original plan was simple: Stay hidden until all of you died in wars or starved to death in a habitat you had ruined beyond saving," a secret-race member finally explains. "Unfortunately, it's our habitat as well. In the meantime, our chances of being discovered have grown... We want you gone. Now." Robinson grips his readers by combining visceral fear with intellectual inquiry. This creepily credible tale will have his readers looking more closely at their so-called friends.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A thriller about the distant past and terrifying future, set in a vividly drawn San Francisco, from the author of The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991), etc. When a physician, Larry Shea, is killed by feral dogs, his friend Arthur Banks suspects foul play: Shea had been on route to give a speech to Banks's club, a group of intellectuals who have met periodically since the 1960s. While previously autopsying the victim of an automobile crash, Shea had discovered another, ancient species of humankind, a distant cousin of Homo sapiens that was slower to develop language skills but grew adept in telepathy and telekinesis. Shea left behind him a rough draft of an article on the ``Old People,'' and soon those others in Banks's group who are acquainted with the article begin dying, all of them violently. Most are apparent suicides, and Banks, too, nearly kills himself after hes visited with an incredible feeling of sadness for all the loneliness in the world and for the inevitable doom of humanity. His son saves himbut then son and wife disappear. Grimly, Banks sets out to find the secret of the murders and why his family seems connected to them. At last the motivation of the Old People grows clear: not just to remain hidden, but to war against a Homo sapiens bent on destroying the earth. The Old People are about to inherit the earth, after all, for they have unleashed a doomsday virusa particularly virulent form of TB to which they are immune and Homo sapiens is not. Preposterous, but riveting all the same. Robinson's gloomy prognosis for the destruction of every ecosystem sustaining Homo sapiens seems all too plausible. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
The Gears launch a new series with this story of an anthropologist called on to investigate a centuries-old mass grave in New Mexico. The bones, belonging to women and children with smashed skulls, soon begin to speak.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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