SecondWorld

March 19, 2012
Relentless pacing and numerous plot twists drive this compelling stand-alone from Robinson (Threshold), though readers should be prepared for a far-fetched premise involving Nazis, a grand-scale conspiracy, and massive iron clouds in the atmosphere. When NCIS agent Lincoln Miller, who’s temporarily stationed at an underwater research station off the coast of Key Largo, Fla., notices an abundance of reddish flakes in the water, he initially believes that it’s illegally dumped waste. But he quickly realizes that it’s much worse—the ocean is littered with dead fish. Once on land, Miller finds a world without oxygen covered in red ash and fresh corpses. Using an oxygen tank to stay alive, he discovers that while the disaster wasn’t global, it may just be the beginning of the end. Thriller fans and apocalyptic fiction aficionados alike will find this audaciously plotted novel enormously satisfying. Author tour. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media.

April 15, 2012
One of the only survivors of a bizarre holocaust in Miami caused by lethal red flakes falling from the sky, NCIS agent Lincoln Miller must defuse a late-developing plot hatched by the Nazis to reboot the planet with Aryans by killing everyone else. In the initial attacks, Tokyo and Tel Aviv also lose millions of people to the ghastly storms, which deplete the target areas of oxygen and poison anyone who comes into contact with the deposits. Miller, a former SEAL who was underwater when Miami receives its lethal rainfall, becomes the president's go-to guy to save the world. Before he can take on the bad guys, he has to figure out how to keep breathing (he collects abandoned SCUBA tanks). Then he has to evade grim-faced snipers and assassins and survive an assortment of gunshots, car crashes and blows to the head. With sidekicks including a German female Interpol agent whose grandparents were among the scientists participating in hideous Nazi experiments, Miller discovers that thousands of stealth antigravity satellites are hovering up above to capture refined iron and shoot it downward as toxic ammo. His desperate efforts take him from New Hampshire to Europe to Antarctica, and from abject fear to wisecracks. Has he really turned his cell phone into a targeting device for a nuclear missile, he's asked. "That a problem?" he replies. A brisk thriller with neatly timed action sequences, snappy dialogue and the ultimate sympathetic figure in a badly burned little girl with a fighting spirit, this novel doesn't waste time addressing such matters as why the fate of the world rests in the hands of one man. The Nazis are determined to have the last gruesome laugh in this efficient doomsday thriller.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2012
The premise sounds too implausible: someone, somehow, has sucked the oxygen out of the air. People are suffocating, dying. A faceless enemy, using a plan first hatched by the Nazis during WWII, is planning to destroy this world and build a new one from the ground up. Only Lincoln Miller, an NCIS agent who used to be a Navy SEAL, can stop them. If the book weren't so compellingly written, it would be laughable. But, instead, it's gripping, propelled by expertly controlled pacing and lively characters. Miller is a solidly designed hero, but let's not forget his costars, a badly burned 12-year-old girl in a portable oxygen tent and the German Interpol agent whose grandmother was instrumental in the design of the horror now being visited upon the world. Robinson's punchy prose style will appeal to fans of Matthew Reilly's fast-paced, bigger-than-life thrillers, but this is in no way a knockoff. It's a fresh and satisfying thriller that should bring its author plenty of new fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)