Artifact: A Daredevils Club Adventure

Overview

Four bestselling authors combine their unique talents in an action-packed novel that delivers enough excitement, intrigue, suspense and adventure for a lifetime. This potent collaboration started with Janet Berliner, who has always been fascinated by the danger and thrill of daredevilry. She challenged the most exciting writers she knew to write stories about the most daring, death-defying risks they could imagine. When the results came in, the four writers realized that they had something extraordinary; not stories, but the seeds of a tremendously exciting novel.

Editorial Reviews

Given the formidable talents of the writers involved, this first adventure of a club of professional thrillseekers is a surprisingly unfulfilling affair. The six male members of the Daredevils Club meet every New Year's Eve to swap stories about the past year's missions impossible. In 1999, oil magnate Frik Van Alman sows the seeds for the following year's bragfest when he asks his fellow Daredevils to help him recover pieces of an unearthly artifact he discovered while drilling in an undersea cavern. Never mind that the devious Frik doesn't tell them the artifact can harness energy magically, or that its parts were deliberately disassembled and dispersed to different people by one of his employees (whose death Frik hastened) to keep it out of his unscrupulous hands. The Daredevils are off and running, and the scavenger hunt that follows is as disjointed as the artifact itself, split over subplots involving an ecoterrorist group's efforts to destroy Frik's oil business and the growing suspicion of Dr. Peta Whyte, lover of a deceased Daredevil, that Frik will stop at nothing to get what he wants. Explosions, death-defying feats and Houdini-like disappearances and reappearances keep things lively. But there are also enough convenient coincidences and key mysteries left unexplained to raise doubts about how closely the authors collaborated on the plotting. (June 9) Forecast: Four major writers almost mandates that each writer's audience will give this book a try, but poor word of mouth could undercut the prospects for any planned sequel. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Kevin J. Anderson

Kevin J. Anderson has more than sixteen million books in print in 30 languages, including Dune novels written with Brian Herbert, Star Wars and X-Files novels, and a collaboration with Dean Koontz. He just finished the sixth book in his epic space opera, The Saga of Seven Suns. He and his wife Rebecca Moesta have written numerous bestselling and award-winning young adult novels.

Bio of Paul F. Wilson

Paul was born May 17, 1946, and raised in New Jersey where he misspent his youth playing with matches, poring over Uncle Scrooge and E.C. comics, reading Lovecraft, Matheson, Bradbury, and Heinlein, listening to Chuck Berry and Alan Freed on the radio, and watching Soupy Sales and horror movies. (He'd sneak off on Saturday afternoons when he should have been cutting the lawn and catch double features at the Oritani Theatre, or stay up late with Zacherley on Shock Theatre; in one week he managed to see King Kong 11 times on Million Dollar Movie.) Eventually, he learned to read, and even write. In 1968 he graduated Georgetown University but selflessly eschewed public life in order to give his classmate, Bill Clinton, a better chance in the political ring. He began selling short fiction while a first-year medical student and has been writing fiction and practicing medicine ever since. He sold a number of comic scripts to CREEPY and EERIE during the 1970s, but generally concentrated on prose fiction. His short stories and novelettes have appeared in all the major markets and numerous best-of-the-year collections; his novels have made the national bestseller lists.

Bio of Matthew J. Costello

Matthew J. Costello lives north of New York City. He is the author of numerous novels, including Unidentified, a recent Literary Guild Selection, and has teamed up with F. Paul Wilson on two previous novels.

Bio of Janet Berliner

Born September 24, 1939 to Thea Abraham-Berliner and Manfred Berliner in Cape Town, South Africa. Her parents and grandparents had fled Germany in 1936 to escape the growing Nazi terror. Janet's father left soon after Janet's birth to fight the Germans in North Africa, and returned only to tell her mother that he had found another woman. Raised mostly by her grandparents while her mother worked a succession of jobs--including South Africa's first traveling sales woman--Janet never learned to tell the difference between black and white. That failure caused her great trouble as she grew older and began working for a small newspaper. First writing reviews, and later becoming "Dear Jan" to South Africa's Jewish youth, Janet, now Gluckman, found an outlet for her life-long desire to write. This outlet also led her to plenty of trouble, however, given her views. Soon after her twenty-first birthday, Janet and her husband tried to get permanent visas for America. They were told that there was a twenty year waiting list. Because they had asked, they were also refused tourist visas. They took a student ship to England and, once there, managed to get Canadian tourist visas. They found a cheapie flight to North America and began the battle for permanent status. After six tense months of living in hotel rooms and eating "ketchup soup" to stretch their meager savings, Janet and her husband acquired green cards. They became citizens of the United States of America in 1966.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Tor/Forge

Filesize

617.21 KB

Number of Pages

288

eBook ISBN

9781429970266