Evensong
-
- $15.99
-
- $15.99
Publisher Description
A near-future thriller where those who protect humanity are not always completely human.
The future is a dangerous place. Keeping the world stable and peaceful when competing corporate interests and nation-states battle for power, wealth, and prestige has only gotten harder over the years. But that’s the United Nations’ job. So the UN has changed along with the rest of the world. When the UN’s “soft” diplomacy fails, it has harder options. Quiet, scalpel-like options: The Dead—biologically enhanced secret operatives created by the UN to solve the problems no one else can.
Anwar Abbas is one of The Dead. When the Controller-General of the UN asks him to perform a simple bodyguard mission, he’s insulted and resentful: mere bodyguard work is a waste of his unique abilities. But he takes the job, because to refuse it would be unthinkable.
Anwar is asked to protect Olivia del Sarto, the host of an important upcoming UN conference. Olivia is head of the world’s fastest-growing church, but in her rise to power she has made enemies: shadowy enemies with apparently limitless resources.
Anwar is one of the deadliest people on earth, but her enemies have something which kills people like him. And they’ve sent it for her. It’s out there, unstoppable and untraceable, getting closer as the conference approaches.
As he and Olivia ignite a torrid affair, Anwar must uncover the conspiracy that threatens to destroy her, the UN, and even The Dead.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Ominously credible changes in the world, which Love (Faith) has nudged a scant 45 years into the future, provide fertile ground for his extended musing on the nature of the soul, but indistinct motives and implausible reactions hamper his efforts. The promising foundation staggers under the weight of an improbable affair between bioengineered super-killer Anwar Abbas an employee of the newly interventionist U.N.'s black-ops division, the Consultancy and Olivia del Sarto, the archbishop of the morally ambiguous New Anglican Church. Anwar is dispatched from Malaysia to England to protect Olivia from a spookily rendered terrorist organization that has threatened to assassinate her during a U.N. summit on water rights. The obdurately analytical assassin's attraction to the supposedly brilliant archbishop, rendered as a mess of heated fleshy appetites and coldly cutting mood swings, requires more suspension of disbelief than any of the futuristic elements. The inventive blending of religion, commerce, and government is impeded by talky, impassioned trysts, and while the action, when it arrives, is given appropriate flourish, scant satisfaction can be derived from the accompanying revelations, when for too long the story has been shouldered by characters whose underdeveloped connection remains incomprehensible.
