After the great storm by Ann Dombroski

Fascinating! Absolutely enthralling! Ann Dombroski has created an exciting thriller, set in a very believable future world, after a historic ‘Great Storm’. Storms have become a regular event, and ‘Great Storm no.5’ is another that uproots trees, cracks buildings apart, and derails transport Sliders.

Alice Kaczmarek’s husband Daniel is imprisoned in the Maximum Security Vertical Farm, convicted of sabotaging a Slider and causing the deaths of seven people. Convinced of his innocence, and that he has been framed, Alice is desperately juggling finances to pay for appeal lawyers, IVF fees, her Eterne anti-aging treatment, residential care for her grandmother, her brother-in-law’s special care, storm damage to her home, and possibly even bribe money to get Daniel out.

Communication during prison visits has to be covert, secret messages implied in casual conversation. Outside, there is the tension of constant surveillance, cameras, vans, people watching, calls tapped. Alice doesn’t know who to trust. Is Daniel’s friend Lowell really his friend, or a spy? Amidst all this, a strange creature drags onto her doorstep, half human, half bat, injured and seriously ill.

Dombroski’s novel is both speculative fiction and tense thriller. The elements of the modern world are not described in detail, they are just taken for granted that this is the usual way of things: transport by Sliders and autopods, communication by wrist-phone, biometric scanning, automatically operating homes. Alice’s job is creating patient-specific implants: heart valves, kidneys, bones. The medical world experiments with genetic selection and xenotransplantation. ‘Mission to Mars’ televises in real-time the daily lives of astronauts on their seven month trip.

At the same time, Alice has to navigate the world of secret surveillance, corporate corruption, and the dark underworld of criminals and thugs. There is constant suspicion, and constant questioning of morals and ethics. It makes for a tense thriller that keeps readers engaged to the end, raising many issues that will linger in the mind long afterwards. It’s an absorbing novel, highly recommended, even for those who might not normally select speculative fiction.

Themes: Thriller, Future, Ethics, Surveillance, Corruption, Medical experimentation.

Helen Eddy