Wednesday, June 20, 7pm – Fiction
Eliot Pattison
author of Ashes of the Earth: A Mystery of Post-Apocalyptic America ($15.95 Counterpoint)
In a post-apocalyptic world, Hadrian Boone, a fallen founder of the colony of Carthage, joins forces with a police woman to investigate the camps of outcasts in the hopes of discovering who murdered the colony’s leading scientist. By the Edgar Award-winning author of The Skull Mantra. Reprint.
Thirty years after global holocaust, the colony of Carthage still struggles to build its new world. While steam engines and other early industrial technology have empowered its economy, the fragile society is undermined by secret crimes, rifts between generations, government censorship, and a legacy of casting out those who suffer from radiation sickness.
Embittered survivor Hadrian Boone?once a revered colony founder?has been hounded by despair and the ghosts of his past into a life of drunkenness and frequent imprisonment for challenging the governor’s tyranny. But when a gentle old man, the colony’s leading scientist, is murdered, Hadrian glimpses chilling secrets behind the killing that could destroy the colony. Realizing that he may be the only one able to expose the truth, Hadrian begins a desperate quest through the underbelly of the colony into the wrenching camps of the outcasts, escorted by a young policewoman who struggles to cope with the physical and emotional remnants of the prior world. Ultimately, Hadrian’s journey becomes one of self-discovery. In his search to find justice, his greatest challenge is navigating the tortuous path of the human spirit in a world that has been forever fractured.
Eliot Pattison is the author of The Skull Mantra, winner of the Edgar Award and finalist for the Gold Dagger, Water Touching Stone, Bone Rattler, and most recently Eye of the Raven. Pattison resides in rural Pennsylvania with his wife, three children, two horses, and two dogs on a colonial-era farm.
