Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Hardwood Creek Library (Forest Lake) | FICTION SAK | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Park Grove Library (Cottage Grove) | FICTION SAK | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION SAK | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
An instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. Soon to be a major motion picture from Imagine Entertainment and producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.
Between life and death lies an epic war, a relentless manhunt through two worlds...and an unforgettable love story.
The last thing FBI agent Will Brody remembers is the explosion--a thousand shards of glass surfing a lethal shock wave.
He wakes without a scratch.
The building is in ruins. His team is gone. Outside, Chicago is dark. Cars lie abandoned. No planes cross the sky. He's relieved to spot other people--until he sees they're carrying machetes.
Welcome to the afterlife.
Claire McCoy stands over the body of Will Brody. As head of an FBI task force, she hasn't had a decent night's sleep in weeks. A terrorist has claimed eighteen lives and thrown the nation into panic.
Against this horror, something reckless and beautiful happened. She fell in love...with Will Brody.
But the line between life and death is narrower than any of us suspect--and all that matters to Will and Claire is getting back to each other.
From the author of the million-copy bestselling Brilliance Trilogy comes a mind-bending thriller that explores our most haunting and fundamental question: What if death is just the beginning?
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Edgar-finalist Sakey follows his Brilliance trilogy with a remarkably conceived and passionately realized supernatural thriller featuring two dedicated FBI agents. Will Brody, a former Marine who's now an FBI special agent, is killed in an operation to save Chicago from a serial sniper and finds himself in the "echo," the first of a series of nesting postmortem existences. Will's lover and boss, Claire McCoy, later joins him in the echo after she dies pursuing the sniper. Together Will and Claire, who have become each other's "calm," battle Edmund, a centuries-old satanic entity who feeds on the spirits of other people. Flashes of Edmund's evil machinations recur sporadically throughout this gripping tale, whose underlying message emphasizes the need for both individuals and groups to take responsibility for their actions. Balancing lyric romance and altruistic self-sacrifice with horrifying scenes of cannibalism and wrenching violence, Sakey comes up with a fascinating answer to the eternal question of why humans exist. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
When two FBI agents are killed in the line of duty, they discover death isn't at all what they imagined.Sakey (Written in Fire, 2016, etc.) follows up his incredible Brilliance trilogy with an otherworldly stand-alone thriller about a subterranean war between gods and monsters. The book opens with a story about a young boy in a cannibalistic horror scene on a ship at sea circa 1532. Then the book cuts to the present day, where FBI Agent Claire McCoy is leading a task force hunting the sniper terrorizing Chicago. She's also newly in love with fellow agent Will Brody. But when Brody runs down the sniper, Simon Tucks, he's killed instantly by a bomb. For Claire, that should have been the end of Will Brody, and yet....Next, Brody awakens in an ethereal version of Chicago leached of color and deprived of technology. His new companions explain that this is the Echo, a kind of purgatory for souls killed suddenly, violently. Unfortunately, this fate also falls upon Claire when Simon Tucks kills her in a suicide bombing, reuniting them even in death. From here, Sakey spins out an ambitious mythology that mixes horror, police procedural, and tense action with big questions about the nature of existence. In this new world, Eaters kill other people all over again to gain their life force. There is also a race of Elders, most notably our cannibal Edmund, who have lived hundreds of years by torturing the living. "All the random, inexplicable brutalities," Sakey writes. "The school shooters and psychotic Uber drivers. The mothers who drowned their children. The serial killers with their duct tape and their butcher knives. The maniacs who fired round after round into crowded nightclubs, pausing only to reload. The atrocities for which there was no answer." It's a disturbing book born in dark times but one in which Sakey employs all his storytelling gifts to craft a noodle-bender of the first order. A love story enmeshed in a twisty thriller that peels back the universe to see what lies beneath. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Sakey began his career with a series of smart, compulsively readable thrillers about more or less ordinary Chicagoans wrestling with personal problems and the zeitgeist, and getting into potentially fatal trouble. But with Brilliance (2013) and the Brilliance series that followed, he stepped brilliantly into the realm of speculative fiction. Afterlife is a deep dive into the unknowable. Chicago is being terrorized by a preternaturally lethal sniper, and FBI agents Will Brody and his lover, Claire McCoy, are desperate to end the terror. But Will is murdered by a bomb in an abandoned West Side church. Claire is bereft, but the dead Brody finds himself wandering the streets of a Chicago populated only by people armed with clubs, axes, and swords. Some threaten him, but Will encounters a group of people who lead him to their refuge. Meanwhile, Claire kills the sniper but dies in the effort. The couple are reunited, and they conclude that being together in the afterlife isn't bad except for the eaters, dead people who have learned that killing makes them stronger. Even worse, the sniper is organizing eaters into an army. Afterlife is simultaneously a beautiful love story, a grim tale of apocalyptic conflict, and an opportunity for an insightful writer to ruminate on the eternal verities. Great appeal across genres.--Gaughan, Thomas Copyright 2017 Booklist
