Rift
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In an age where reality and science fiction are colliding, Richard Cox’s extraordinary debut thriller takes its place as an all-too-believable novel of white-knuckle adventure. For when an ordinary man makes one great leap for mankind, he triggers a chain of events that endangers his life, fractures his certainty, and plunges everyone he knows into a place where nothing is what it seems.
Cameron Fisher is bored. With his wife, Misty. With his job as an accountant at NeuroStor, the high-tech microchip firm. With everything about his life—until he is offered five million dollars to test a secret new technology that uses a wrinkle in quantum physics to transmit matter from one place to another. His employer’s high-stakes brainchild is ready for its first human test. And Cameron Fisher is all too happy to oblige.
One moment Cameron is sitting naked in a seven-by-seven-foot metal room in Houston; the next second he is in a laboratory in Phoenix—trembling now not with fear but joy. Within hours, Cameron will be free to go home. But first there is a celebratory drink—and a strange and scintillating meeting with a spectacularly beautiful woman. Then he’s being followed by men with guns . . . and suddenly Cameron is running, stumbling, falling into a world that looks like his own, but in which he has become a ragged stranger, accused of murder and pursued by people who want him dead. It appears that NeuroStor’s invention has changed Cameron. Next, it will change the entire world.
With its stunning twists, sensual adventure, and raw, psychological suspense, Rift takes readers on a thrill-a-second ride to one last amazing choice for Cameron Fisher. A gripping and utterly satisfying work of storytelling magic, Rift asks the ultimate question: What if you had to die to find out what it really means to be alive?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cox's debut techno-thriller offers a far-fetched plot, a fast-paced narrative and a well-drawn protagonist. Cameron Fisher, an unhappily married accountant for a tech corporation, NeuroStor, is about to be fired when his younger boss offers him a one-time opportunity: participate in a high-risk scientific project for the company and receive $5 million. Cameron agrees, as much for the adventure as for the money. The project will theoretically permit near-instantaneous human transport; and sure enough, 45 minutes after he enters a booth at corporate HQ in Houston, Cameron emerges from another at the Phoenix office. Told to stick around for a couple of days, he meets his best friend, Tom. They go to a strip club where he is watched by two men and meets a dancer, Crystal, who somehow knows as much about the project he is participating in as he does. When the men follow Cameron and Tom to a golf course that same afternoon, he knows something is up; when they start shooting, the murder and espionage packed plot kicks into overdrive. With the exception of the protagonist, whose backstory is astutely related, the characters are one-dimensional (evil corporate execs, stripper with apparent heart of gold, cranky computer expert). Cox has enough natural storytelling skill to keep his audience hooked, but the innumerable twists and turns test the reader's patience. Teleportation is just the starting point for a constantly morphing techno plot that even Matrix fans might find strained.