From Amazon
Philip Kerr applies his smart, suspenseful thriller style to science fiction in
The Second Angel. In 2069, Earth is devastated by climate change, killer plagues, and scarce resources. P2 is a deadly (but curable) virus that infects almost the entire population. The cure is clean blood, which is in critically short supply and is affordable only to the very rich, who live in protected enclaves and engage in market speculation on the price of the vital fluid. On the moon, sex hotels and high-security prisons share turf with the First National Blood Bank, where uncontaminated blood is kept. Enter Dana Dallas, a crack security systems designer and member of the wealthy, healthy elite. When he finds out his infant daughter needs clean blood to survive, he starts a chain of events that will make him the sworn enemy of some very dangerous people. Dallas teams up with several shady characters to try and break the bank, and Kerr sprinkles the text with "historical" footnotes to help the reader understand the social context of the action. A mostly annoying narrator--part of a badly connected subplot-- explains the immunological and social importance of blood. While Kerr's ideas and plotting are terrific, his execution is rather stilted. A thug who says things like, "I believe that meaning can be established. Yes, I think it was Sir Karl Popper who said that," might have been a funny character--if everyone else in the book didn't talk that way.
--Therese Littleton
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Quantum physics collides with metaphysics in this futuristic thriller, and sends its plot careening into wildly unpredictable territory. In the year 2069, most of the earth's population is infected with P2, a slow-acting parvovirus that inevitably brings ghastly death. A small, uninfected sliver of humanity lives in secluded aseptic environments and stores uncontaminated blood reserves on the moon in a bank whose impenetrable security system has been designed by architect John Dallas. But after Dallas challenges the decision to deny blood to his sick daughter, he's viewed as a potential security risk. When a botched attempt to kill him leaves his wife and child dead, Dallas schemes to break into the blood bank and destroy his employer's business?a stratagem that will force him into dangerous confrontation with protective nanotechnology, radioactive defense mechanisms and a transcendentally evolved artificial intelligence that oversees the bank. Kerr's (A Five-Year Plan) blend of science and intrigue merits comparison to the work of Michael Crichton, and his protagonists?a team of infected desperadoes who will use the heisted blood to cure themselves?will put readers in mind of Donald Westlake's tales of likably larcenous bank robbers. Once off the earth, however, the narrative deteriorates into a dilettantish display of SF cliches that includes fuzzy computer technology, speculative epidemiology, and an overlong adventure in virtual reality. Ultimately, Kerr depends on an omniscient Outer Limits-type control voice and intrusive historical and scientific footnotes to pull the tale's chaotic elements together. Though its suspense is as taut as a tourniquet, this excursion into philosophical science fiction could stand a transfusion of logic. Agent, A.P. Watt Ltd.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
