Review & Giveaway: Ghost Country by Patrick Lee

Released yesterday (Dec. 28) from HarperCollins was Patrick Lee's Ghost Country. I loved loved loved this book (and you know I never gush). Want to win a copy? Read on...

PLOT:   For decades, inexplicable technology has passed into our world through the top secret anomaly called the Breach. The latest device can punch a hole into the future . . .What Paige Campbell saw when she opened a door into seventy years from now scared the hell out of her. She and her Tangent colleagues brought their terrible discovery to the President—and were met with a hail of automatic gunfire after leaving the White House. Only Paige survived. Fearing a terrifying personal destiny revealed to him from the other side of the Breach, Travis Chase abandoned Tangent . . . and Paige Campbell. Now he must rescue her—because Paige knows tomorrow’s world is desolate and dead, a ghost country scattered with the bones of billions. And Doomsday will dawn in just four short months . . . unless they can find the answers buried in the ruins to come. But once they cross the nightmare border into Ghost Country, they might never find their way back . . .

THE AUTHOR: This is the second Travis Chase novel from Michigan author Patrick Lee, following The Breach.

MY THOUGHTS: Okay, I have to preface this by confessing that I am a SERIOUS disaster-movie geek. If it's a disaster flick, however awful, I assure you I have seen it. I probably own it. (The irony that I was myself in the middle of Hurricane Katrina is not lost on me, and I'll admit I lost my taste for disasters for a couple of years. Believe me, they're not nearly so fun when they're happening to you.) So it follows that I have a weakness for apocalyptic fiction. Ghost Country is a great apocalyptic story, and I'll be going back and picking up its predecessor The Breach now. Patrick Lee achieves something not too many apoca-fiction (I need to trademark that) authors can, and that is decent characterization as well as worldbuilding. Oh, they're not the world's deepest-feeling characters; the emotion is very subdued. But it's there, and I give the author props for that. The worldbuilding, and the ability to convey a complex system of people moving back and forth between a seventy-year span without confusion, is extremely well done. In my new rating system, I give Ghost Country a 62: that's the page at which I didn't want to put the book down till it was finished.

THE GIVEAWAY: I'm giving away a copy of Ghost Country--just tell me your favorite disaster movie or apoca-fiction book (my fave apoca-novel is Stephen King's The Stand). As always, extra entry for comments, blog followers, followers on Twitter @Suzanne_Johnson, and an extra for Tweeting (or Retweeting) the contest. Drawing will take place on Friday, New Year's Eve.