Immortal
A Novel
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
WOULD YOU KILL TO LIVE FOREVER?
When the body of a gunshot victim rolls into the Santa Fe morgue, it should be a day like any other for medical investigator Lillian Cruz. Yet upon examination, the corpse appears to be over a hundred years old with smallpox scars, and an odd wound protrudes from the victim’s leg. Lodged in the femur, under decrepit scar tissue, is a bullet shaped like a musket ball. The bullet looks like it was fired during the Civil War and had remained in the victim’s leg ever since.
Rattled by the discovery, Cruz instructs her assistant to take specimens to the state authorities immediately and not to tell a soul about it. Minutes after the assistant leaves, the lights go dark in the morgue and Cruz is kidnapped.
The Defense Intelligence Agency calls in former war correspondent Ethan Warner and his partner, Nicola Lopez, to discreetly investigate the disappearance. And very quickly, a relatively simple case turns into something much more sinister. With each new lead they uncover, Warner and Lopez are inadvertently bringing a warped and dangerous individual closer to achieving a catastrophic goal: immortality. In the spine-chilling tradition of Michael Crichton and James Rollins, Immortal is an action-packed blockbuster that combines science, suspense, and ingenious speculation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
British author Crawford's second speculative thriller featuring Ethan Warner, with its cleverly introduced premise, improves on his debut, 2011's Covenant. When New Mexico police respond to a report of a shooting on the Santa Fe Trail, they find the gunman, Hiram Conley, dressed in a ragged Civil War era Union uniform and armed with a musket. Conley's wounded victim, Tyler Willis, cries, "Don't kill him! He's too old to die," just before the police shoot Conley in self-defense. The autopsy bears out Willis's cryptic assessment. The body has mummified overnight and bears other traces indicating that Conley was born long before his claimed birth year of 1940. After the corpse and the ME who studied it disappear, the matter comes to the attention of Warner and his partner, Nicola Lopez, bail bondsmen recruited by the Defense Intelligence Agency to investigate. Assured pacing and plotting make up for underdeveloped characters.