Description de l’éditeur
Orphan Black meets Lord of the Flies in this riveting new thriller from the co-author of the Virals series.
It's been happening since Min was eight. Every two years, on her birthday, a strange man finds her and murders her in cold blood. But hours later, she wakes up in a clearing just outside her tiny Idaho hometown—alone, unhurt, and with all evidence of the horrifying crime erased.
Across the valley, Noah just wants to be like everyone else. But he’s not. Nightmares of murder and death plague him, though he does his best to hide the signs. But when the world around him begins to spiral toward panic and destruction, Noah discovers that people have been lying to him his whole life. Everything changes in an eye blink.
For the planet has a bigger problem. The Anvil, an enormous asteroid threatening all life on Earth, leaves little room for two troubled teens. Yet on her sixteenth birthday, as she cowers in her bedroom, hoping not to die for the fifth time, Min has had enough. She vows to discover what is happening in Fire Lake and uncovers a lifetime of lies: a vast conspiracy involving the sixty-four students of her sophomore class, one that may be even more sinister than the murders.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Reichs (coauthor of the Virals series) incorporates enough life-threatening, apocalyptic elements into this fast-moving tale for half a dozen ordinary thrillers: an extinction-event-size asteroid, comets crashing to Earth, mysterious tsunamis and earthquakes, secret medical experiments, libertarian survivalists, and more. Sixteen-year-old Min Wilder, meanwhile, has problems of another sort: on her birthday, a stranger, who may be related to the aforementioned apocalyptic events, murdered her, only for her to wake up, apparently unharmed, in a forest near the Idaho trailer park where she lives. This has now happened five times: five deaths and five resurrections. With worldwide destruction imminent, a military unit has sealed off Min's town, and she learns that her classmate Noah (who trades narration duties with Min) is experiencing the same kind of recurring violence. Min is a tough hero, and her close friend Tack is compulsively funny, though other characters hew more to stereotypes. Reichs pulls everything together at the book's end, and a plot twist few will see coming should leave readers eagerly awaiting the second book in this duology. Ages 12 up.
