FRACTURE EVENT

A young graduate student suspects that a corporation will use her game-changing, apocalyptic anthropological research for nefarious purposes in a new novel by Gear and Gear.

The authors expand their Anasazi thriller series, which began with Bone Walker (2008), to introduce 27-year-old Dr. Anika French, who’s developed a revolutionary computer model that could allow archaeologists to understand exactly why history’s greatest civilizations collapsed. After Dr. Mark Schott, Anika’s committee chair and former lover, partners with the shady ECSITE corporation, he makes her a financially irresistible offer to take her on as his research assistant. He insists that ECSITE will only use her research for humanitarian purposes. “I have the gut feeling that something’s wrong about this, Mark,” she tells him, but she accepts, nonetheless. However, Schott steals her research for an article in a scholarly journal, “THE COLLAPSE OF THE NATION-STATE: A PREDICTIVE STATISTICAL MODEL,” which captures the attention of both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense, and they bring Anika in to lead an elite team to investigate what Schott and ECSITE may be up to. The team includes the star of Gear and Gear’s series, anthropologist Maureen Cole (with an assist from archaeologist Dusty Stewart), and bodyguard Skip Murphy. Early on, Stewart states he will miss the days when “all we had to do was worry about Navajo witches and prehistoric serial killers,” and, indeed, readers should be aware going in that this is not Indiana Jones–style archaeology; this is “stochastically modeled statistical probability” and “correlation coefficients” archeology. However, there’s also plenty of danger and well-calibrated suspense to go along with the complicated lingo of the trade. As a character, Schott is merely, as Dusty terms him, a “swine,” but ECSITE CEO Mikael Zoakalski ably fills the void as a despicable villain, and the brilliant Anika develops some fine heroic chops over the course of the novel.

A timely spinoff thriller with series potential in its own right.