Journey Into the Flame

October 21, 2013
Lifeless prose hobbles Williams’s debut, the first in a near-future thriller trilogy. Art restorer Logan Cutler, a resident of New Chicago, Ill., decides to auction off his copy of The Chronicles of Satraya, one of the four original sets of a transformative text that has provided spiritual solace to the survivors of a cataclysmic series of natural disasters. When one of the bidders is murdered during the auction, Logan discovers that this crime is but one of a chain of outrages, all related to the Chronicles. As members of a shadowy cabal—descendants of the secret rulers of Earth—maneuver to stage a daring, bloody coup, Logan and his allies race to undercover old secrets of the first Council of Satraya; failure means mega-deaths and a world forever crushed by an oppressive oligarchy. While the weaponization of neuroscience lends interest, it doesn’t mesh well with magic and a muddled new age philosophy.

October 15, 2013
This adequate New-Age thriller, offering a vision of an apocalyptic future, is the first volume of Williams' Rising World trilogy. In 2027, a solar flare has brought down thousands of airplanes, and a four-degree shift in the Earth's axis has caused cataclysmic earthquakes and coastline shifts in an event called the Great Disruption. By 2069, the world is still pretty much a mess. Remnants of Washington, D.C., and Fairfax, Va., remain, along with some old Federal-style homes and select foreign cities. Key to the story are The Chronicles of Satraya, which contain such wisdom as "Pass your values on to your children, but do not be afraid to let your traditions go." Logan Cutler, the hero, auctions off the only extant originals in order to pay off his debts, but the Wrong People want to get their mitts on them. Only the originals will do, since they possess supernatural qualities beyond the words themselves. The Chronicles tie into a plot to kill off a portion of the world's population and turn the rest into people incapable of thinking for themselves. Can villains Simon and Andrea use a serum to "exterminate the free thinkers of the world?" Will the bad guy's mother give him permission to shoot the hero between the eyes, or will he just give a speech instead? There is a race against the clock as the man-made disaster is set to occur at Liberty Moment on Freedom Day. The urgent deadline is standard thriller fare that generally adds to the reader's excitement, so why doesn't it work here? Maybe because the real disaster already happened with the axial tilt. Really, what could be worse than that? Fans of Dan Brown will find this book worth a try for its action and mystical angle. Other thriller fans may just feel burned.

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December 15, 2013
The year is 2057, 30 years after the Great Disruption, when a solar storm smacked into Earth and threw the planet off its axis, plunging the world into apocalyptic chaos. Near an abandoned campfire, a man finds some ancient books, the Chronicles of Satraya, in a leather satchel. Four decades later, the world is more technologically advanced than it ever was, thanks to the teachings of the Chronicles, several sets of which were found around the world. When a struggling artist, Logan Cutler, decides to auction off his own copies of the books, he discovers that some people are extremely interested in getting their hands on theminterested enough to commit murder. A group known as Reges Hominum has existed in the shadows of society for centuries and now sees an opportunity to seize full control of the world, if they can obtain all copies of the Chronicles, and one set remains to be found. This race-against-time, postapocalyptic adventure keeps us flipping the pages, and the book's wide-open ending cries out for volume two (this is the first of a projected trilogy).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)