Blackout
The addictive international bestselling disaster thriller
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Fast, tense, thrilling - and timely: this will happen one day. Highly recommended' LEE CHILD
'A dazzling debut' Marcel Berlins, The Times
THE TIMES THRILLER OF THE MONTH
THE GLOBAL MILLION-COPY BESTSELLER
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Tomorrow will be too late.
A cold night in Milan, Piero Manzano wants to get home.
Then the traffic lights fail. Manzano is thrown from his Alfa as cars pile up. And not just on this street – every light in the city is dead.
Across Europe, controllers watch in disbelief as electricity grids collapse.
Plunged into darkness, people are freezing. Food and water supplies dry up. The death toll soars.
Former hacker and activist Manzano becomes a prime suspect. But he is also the only man capable of finding the real attackers.
Can he bring down a major terrorist network before it’s too late?
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'Part Dan Brown–style chase and part eco-thriller, this debut—a bestseller in Germany—will get people talking' — Booklist US
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Europe is plunged into darkness, followed by further disasters, in Elsberg's U.S. debut, an uneven thriller, which was a bestseller in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. The blackout, which starts in Italy and is caused by computer hackers with vague dreams of disrupting the world order, quickly spreads north. Elsberg does a good job capturing how life could break down when we lose our main power source. Within days, food riots erupt in major cities, all forms of transportation and communication cease, nuclear power plants leak radiation, and some governments fall to military coups. The plot is told largely through vignettes of various groups of people and their individual struggles. Central among the book's characters are former hacker and activist Piero Manzano and CNN reporter Lauren Shannon. Together, Piero and Lauren try to find the cause of the power loss, though for a while the authorities suspect that they are involved themselves. The plot's tension suffers, however, because so little of the story is devoted to the culprits behind the disaster and their intentions. The story's high point is a one-page shoving match toward the end when one of the hackers is wrestled to the ground and taken into custody. Readers might expect more pop after an entire continent is brought to its knees.
