The year is 3149, and a vast paper destroying blight-papyralysis-has obliterated much of the planet's written history. However, these rare memoirs, preserved for centuries in a volcanic rock, record the strange life of a man trapped in a hermetically sealed underground community.
A series of unexplained deaths in foreign hospitals sends an idealistic UCLA medical student on a desperate search for answers in this chilling tale from the master of the medical thriller. Jennifer Hernandez is a fourth-year medical student at UCLA, just beginning an elective in general surgery, whose world is shattered during a break in an otherwise ordinary day. While relaxing in the surgical lounge of L.A.'s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, she half listens to a TV segment on medical tourism: first-world citizens traveling to third-world countries for surgery.
No place on Earth escaped the nuclear Armageddon that spawned the hellscape known as Deathlands. In a ravaged world where violence and lawlessness rule, a rare breed of hero has emerged. Ryan Cawdor is a lethal fighter who lives by a code of honor and fair play, and that has made him a legend.... Miles beneath the ocean's surface, a decaying redoubt barely protects Ryan and his companions from a watery death. Battling vicious assaults from cyborgs programmed by artificial intelligence to kill them, they're desperate to escape this underwater trap. But above the waves a new threat awaits: a massive predark super ship banished to the seas of Deathlands.
Matt Reddy's old Asiatic Fleet destroyer USS Walker has been mysteriously transported to an alternate version of earth. Here, WWII is no longer raging, and Reddy and his crew have been trying to find a new place for themselves in this strange new world. Now, along with the felinoid Lemurians and Imperial allies, they fight to keep the reptilian Grik, a race growing in supremacy, from reconquering the Lemurians' ancestral home on Madagascar. Reddy and his crew are exhausted, far from reinforcements, and wildly outnumbered.
The long-planned raid on the heart of the Grik Empire has grown more ambitious-and dangerously ill-defined. Only Matthew Reddy, commander of the old destroyer USS Walker, seems focused on its original intent. Many Lemurians see an opportunity to reconquer their sacred homeland, which was stolen long ago, and have no intention of simply striking a blow and then pulling back. Others, Lemurian and human, have their own agendas-which may not be in the best interests of the Alliance. Complicating matters further is Reddy's suspicion that his task force is being stalked by an unknown power bent on aiding the Grik for reasons of its own.