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Sandstorm

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Overview

In this limited edition (featuring 3D cover art) of the latest blockbuster from the bestselling master of suspense, a deadly explosion in a London museum sparks a scientific exploration to an ancient lost city in the Arabian desert, where a terrifying secret threatens the world.

Editorial Reviews

If he weren't such a good action writer, Rollins might make a dynamite climatologist. Each of his thrillers has featured as a central character an extreme environment, most recently the Arctic ice (Ice Hunt, 2003) and now the hot sands of Saudi Arabia. But while Rollins writes settings and scenes that sizzle, what's caught in the heat are usually familiar characters grappling with far-fetched threats, and so it is here. That one male lead is a danger-courting archeologist named Omaha Dunn seems less parodic than tired, and the novel's premise of a hoard of antimatter hidden in the legendary city of Ubar is almost as ridiculous as the idea that this cache has been guarded for millennia by an order of women who propagate without men, via parthenogenesis. Rollins writes less like Michael Crichton than Stan Lee. Most of his readers won't care, though, because there's just enough scientific gloss on the nonsense to make it palatable, and anyway, what they want, and what he delivers, is action, as Omaha and an American military agent, Painter, join forces with two Mideastern women, one a scientist, the other a billionaire, to locate the steadily destabilizing antimatter before it's snatched by a villainous cabal, or worse, blows up the planet. And that's why they'll buy this book in numbers big enough to have it flirt with national bestseller lists. Agent, Russell Galen. (July) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of James Rollins

James Rollins is the bestselling author of five Sigma Force thrillers (Sandstorm, Map of Bones, Black Order, The Judas Strain, and The Last Oracle), the novelization of Lucasfilm's blockbuster movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and five individual adventure-thrillers. He's now working on The Doomsday Key, his twelfth thriller. His first adventure for kids and adults, Jake Ransom and the Skull King's Shadow, will be available May 2009. Known for building high-octane adventures on a solid science foundation, Rollins juxtaposes the familiar with the exotic and then turbocharges his tales with suspense. Always mindful of history's legacy, Rollins reveals how secrets, some hidden for centuries, can change the course of human events. His novels explore how advancing technology can affect society--not just the physical threats of unchecked advancements, but also the spiritual and moral challenges. "The true terror of technology is not the cogs and the wheels, but how it will change us," he says.

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Additional Info

Imprint

HarperCollins

Filesize

1.66 MB

Number of Pages

587

eBook ISBN

9780061156281

Excerpt from: Sandstorm by James Rollins

NOVEMBER 14, 01:33 A.M.
THE BRITISH MUSEUM
LONDON, ENGLAND

HARRY MASTERSON would be dead in thirteen minutes.

If he had known this, he would've smoked his last cigarette down to the filter. Instead he stamped out the fag after only three drags and waved the cloud from around his face. If he was caught smoking outside the guards' break room, he would be shit-canned by that bastard Fleming, head of museum security. Harry was already on probation for coming in two hours late for his shift last week.

Harry swore under his breath and pocketed the stubbed cigarette. He'd finish it at his next break... that is, if they got a break this night.

Thunder echoed through the masonry walls. The winter storm had struck just after midnight, opening with a riotous volley of hail, followed by a deluge that threatened to wash London into the Thames. Lightning danced across the skies in forked displays from one horizon to another. According to the weatherman on the Beeb, it was one of the fiercest electrical storms in over a decade. Half the city had been blacked out, overwhelmed by a spectacular lightning barrage.

And as fortune would have it for Harry, it was his half of the city that went dark, including the British Museum on Great Russell Street. Though they had backup generators, the entire security team had been summoned for additional protection of the museum's property. They would be arriving in the next half hour. But Harry, assigned to the night shift, was already on duty when the regular lights went out. And though the video surveillance cameras were still operational on the emergency grid, he and the shift were ordered by Fleming to proceed with an immediate security sweep of the museum's two and a half miles of halls.

That meant splitting up.

Harry picked up his electric torch and aimed it down the hall. He hated doing rounds at night, when the museum was lost in gloom. The only illumination came from the streetlamps outside the windows. But now, with the blackout, even those lamps had been extinguished. The museum had darkened to macabre shadows broken by pools of crimson from the low-voltage security lamps.