From School Library Journal
YA?Dr. Katharine Sundquist is hired to work on a short term archaeology project in beautiful Maui. It seems to be an ideal situation for her and her 16-year-old son, Michael, who suffers from asthma as well as the recent death of his father. She soon learns, however, that all is not well in paradise. There is a restricted wing in her high-tech laboratory where secret deliveries arrive at midnight and she discovers that deadly medical experiments are being performed. Then Michael and three friends sneak into a dive shop and help themselves to some equipment. During their night dive, they come upon a contaminated area in the ocean. Back on land, they find that their lungs cannot tolerate oxygen and they can survive only by breathing poisonous fumes. One by one, the boys are killed or simply vanish. When Michael is the only one left alive, Katharine must act quickly to save him. YAs will be engrossed in the computer search for DNA codes, the strange prehistoric or not so prehistoric bones that Katharine unearths, and a mysterious underwater geode from outer space. There is enough adventure and suspense in this thriller to capture the interest of even the most reluctant readers.?Katherine Fitch, Lake Braddock Middle School, Burke, VACopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Saul, who recently took a cue from Stephen King with the release of a serialized novel, The Blackstone Chronicles, here tells of a young archaeologist's encounter with horror in Hawaii.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.


Entertainment Weekly
What do sick Hawaiian scuba divers, a mysterious mutant-human burial ground, an erupting Maui volcano, and a nefarious Japanese multinational corporation have in common? Saul calls the muddled, slow-in-coming answer "speculative fiction."


From AudioFile
Teenaged athletes aren't supposed to stop breathing air and start trying to live on exhaust fumes and ammonia. They aren't supposed to drop dead either. Saul's science thriller takes us to Maui, where archaeologist Katharine Sundquist has stumbled onto a terrifying project in the heart of the jungle. Unknowingly her son has found the project, too. Richard Ferrone's narration shines in its impeccable timing. Unfortunately, anyone who has made even a brief visit to the islands will cringe at his mispronunciations of the common Hawaiian words and city names sprinkled throughout the book. R.P.L. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
In Saul's twenty-first novel of psychological and supernatural suspense, Katherine, burned out from living in New York City and tired of seeing her asthmatic 16-year-old-son beaten up by neighborhood thugs, accepts a research position in archaeology in Hawaii, where she will be working with her former lover. She expects the lush island and the laid-back community to bring only peace and happiness. What she does not know is that a huge seed has emerged from within the crust of the earth, spewed up by violent volcanic activity beneath the ocean floor off Hawaii. The seed had arrived from a planet that had ceased to exist 15 million years ago. Soon, nonhuman life-forms begin to threaten Katherine's son's life, and the fight for survival between human and nonhuman escalates. (As Saul writes in his fascinating afterword, poisonous gases from such a seed can end life on Earth, turning Hawaii's tropical paradise into a death zone; he goes on to say that scientists have theorized that unusual life-forms living on the ocean floor near hydrothermal volcanic vents are surviving and developing with no oxygen and no sunlight, thriving in 500-degree heat on gases such as hydrogen sulfide.) The Presence just might be closer to the truth than we care to admit. At any rate, this frightening novel undoubtedly will be Saul's next best-seller. George Cohen


From Kirkus Reviews
A suspenseful thriller from the prolific and craftsmanlike Saul (The Homing, 1993, etc.) that moves like a dream through its paradisiacal Hawaiian landscape. As in his Black Lightning (1995), the lungs here are the focus of the story. In that tale, a serial killer left SS-like black lightning bolts on the pleural cavities of his victims. This time, victims' lungs suddenly become allergic to oxygen and can live only on fumes--those of ammonia, for example--that are normally poisonous. The action begins when Dr. Katharine Sundquist, an archaeologist specializing in early hominids in Africa, is hired for a three-month term to work on bones recently discovered near a vent in a volcano on Maui. Hiring her is a research lab owned by a superrich Japanese medical entrepreneur. Also on hand are a handsome fellow archaeologist who once courted the now widowed Katharine, and her son Michael, who's been overcoming asthma through physical training. When he and three Hawaiian friends go for a night dive, they come upon an underwater area contaminated by a geode from outer space. Back on land, they find that their lungs can't tolerate oxygen. How and why does the geode affect normal breathing? And what of the strange hominid-like bones Katharine patiently unearths? They look like those of early man, which is impossible, since Maui didn't exist when the first humans evolved. Are the bones somehow tied to the geode? Then it turns out that an astronomer in a Maui observatory has been studying a peculiar star some 15 million years old that seems to be sending out a radio signal, which eventually he interprets as a DNA code. Yipes! Folks from outer space are sending DNA code to planet Earth? Saul handily ties all of these elements together in a terse, provocative narrative. Nicely done indeed: strange, disturbing goings-on, with only two spoonsful of outrageous melodrama. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Book Description
Beyond the sparkling Hawaiian beaches, masked by the deceptive beauty of the rainforest, evil awaits sixteen-year-old Michael Sundquist and his mother, Katharine, an anthropologist who has come to the Islands to study the unusual skeletal remains unearthed on the volcanic flanks of Haleakala, Maui.

Yet far below the black depths of the Pacific a mysterious substance snakes through undiscovered fissures in the ocean floor, as nature itself seems to portend the terror to come.


From the Publisher
"Saul has the instincts of a natural storyteller."
-- People


From the Inside Flap
Beyond the sparkling Hawaiian beaches, masked by the deceptive beauty of the rainforest, evil awaits sixteen-year-old Michael Sundquist and his mother, Katharine, an anthropologist who has come to the Islands to study the unusual skeletal remains unearthed on the volcanic flanks of Haleakala, Maui.

Yet far below the black depths of the Pacific a mysterious substance snakes through undiscovered fissures in the ocean floor, as nature itself seems to portend the terror to come.


From the Back Cover
"A SUSPENSEFUL THRILLER . . . PROVOCATIVE . . . NICELY DONE, INDEED."
--Kirkus Reviews

"ENOUGH SMOOTHLY CRAFTED SUSPENSE TO KEEP READERS TURNING PAGES LONG AFTER DARK."
--The Seattle Times

"CLASSIC SAUL . . . A POTENT BREW."
--Publishers Weekly




About the Author
JOHN SAUL's first novel, Suffer the Children, published in 1977, was an immediate million-copy bestseller. He has since written nineteen successive bestselling novels of suspense, including Black Lightning, Guardian, and The Homing. He is most recently the author of the New York Times bestselling serial thriller The Blackstone Chronicles--initially published in six installments, now available in one volume. Mr. Saul divides his time between Seattle, Washington, and Maui, Hawaii.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From above, the day was perfect.

A sky of sapphire blue, a sea of sparkling turquoise. A scattering of marshmallow clouds drifted across a vast expanse of azure.

The wind had died, and the ocean rose and fell gently against the shattered end of a lava flow that extended from the sea to a vent nearly halfway up Kilauea on the island of Hawaii ...

The kind of day for which the diving team had been waiting.

An hour after dawn, they were aboard the tug and barge that carried them out of Hilo Bay. Now the barge was anchored two hundred yards off the end of the lava flow, held in place by three anchors chained to heavy hawsers. The tug itself needed nothing more than a lunch hook to hold its position, and the surface crew -- with little to do until the divers in the water signaled them -- relaxed on the deck, drinking beer and playing cards, as somnolent as the weather itself.

Perhaps if the wind and the sea hadn't conspired against them, someone would have felt the seismic blip and realized that the idyllic day's serenity was an illusion ...

One hundred feet below the surface, the two divers, a man and a woman, worked with intense concentration to retrieve the object they had discovered a week ago.

Embedded in the layer of lava that covered the ocean floor, it was almost perfectly spherical, its color so close to that of the lava itself that the divers, coming upon it for the first time, almost missed it completely. Its shape was what had caught the woman's eye -- a curve caught in her peripheral vision ...

On the tug, the crew set to work to lift the geode from the ocean floor ...

As they concentrated on operating the crane, none of the crew noticed the smoke that was starting to drift through the first tiny rifts in the face of the cliff two hundred yards away.

A hundred feet down, the two divers backed thirty feet away from the geode, then turned to watch as the cable from the crane tightened. For a breath-held moment nothing moved. Then, the geode -- nearly three feet across -- abruptly came free of the lava....

The crane was just swinging the geode onto the deck of the barge when the face of the cliff gave way. As a gout of brilliant lava spewed out, exploding into millions of fragments when it hit the surface of the sea a split second later, the crane operator screamed a warning. Within seconds the hawsers had been cut, the anchors and their chains abandoned, and the tug was running directly out to sea.

The water, dead calm only a few seconds before, churned around the tug, reacting to the explosive force of the fast-growing gush of lava now pouring forth from the crumbling face of the cliff.

"What about the divers?" someone yelled.

But even as he spoke, the terrified crewmen knew the answer to his question....

Using binoculars, the crew scanned the water for any sign of the two divers, but even as they searched, they knew they were bound to fail. They had barely escaped with their own lives. As the storm built and the seas became great, heaving swells, the captain of the tug turned back toward Hilo and the safety of the harbor.

On the barge, three men secured the geode to the deck, silently wondering if it had been worth the lives it had cost to collect it.


From the Hardcover edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

It is an offer anthropologist Katharine Sundquist cannot refuse. A chance to study the unusual skeletal remains unearthed on the volcanic flanks of Haleakala, Maui. Yet for Katharine's sixteen-year-old son, Michael, the sudden move is jarring. It's the last thing he needs while struggling with the still painful death of his father. And here, beyond the sparkling beaches, masked by the deceptive beauty of the rainforest, a terrible danger waits. It begins with a video transmission so shocking that Katharine cannot believe what flashes on her computer screen - then instantly, inexplicably, vanishes. Secret deliveries in the dead of the night to a restricted wing of the high-tech laboratory in which she works signal that behind locked doors some sinister experiment is unfolding. And then, with the sudden, unexplained death of Michael's friend, a disturbing truth dawns: the corporation that is funding Katharine's dig has a far greater investment than she has imagined - an investment in medical terror. And her son may be part of their hideous grand plan.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Like the sinister scientists who figure so prominently in his fiction, Saul (Black Lightning) has perfected a formula: invent an eerie menace and drive home its horror by imagining its impact on an innocent and defenseless victim. In his 21st novel, that victim is Michael Sundquist, the teenage son of anthropologist Katharine Sundquist, who has recently relocated their family to Hawaii. Katharine has come to the islands to study anomalies of early human development found in the lava beds of Maui. She is quickly distracted from her work by Michael's suddenly worsening asthma attacks and by the inexplicable disappearance and death of several boys with whom he went on a secret nighttime scuba dive. It's only a matter of time before she discovers that her research and Michael's problems are interrelated through the Serinus Project, a covert scientific experiment funded by her employer for the purpose of investigating the genetic origins of human life. Katharine's struggle to save her son from becoming a guinea pig sacrificed in the name of science is classic Saul, a pell-mell race against the clock that pits warm human feeling against the cold and dispassionate vacuum of scientific inquiry. Although he breaks no new ground, Saul distills familiar elements of horror, science fiction and the cyberthriller into a potent brew.

Library Journal

Saul, who recently took a cue from Stephen King with the release of a serialized novel, The Blackstone Chronicles, here tells of a young archaeologist's encounter with horror in Hawaii.

School Library Journal

YADr. Katharine Sundquist is hired to work on a short term archaeology project in beautiful Maui. It seems to be an ideal situation for her and her 16-year-old son, Michael, who suffers from asthma as well as the recent death of his father. She soon learns, however, that all is not well in paradise. There is a restricted wing in her high-tech laboratory where secret deliveries arrive at midnight and she discovers that deadly medical experiments are being performed. Then Michael and three friends sneak into a dive shop and help themselves to some equipment. During their night dive, they come upon a contaminated area in the ocean. Back on land, they find that their lungs cannot tolerate oxygen and they can survive only by breathing poisonous fumes. One by one, the boys are killed or simply vanish. When Michael is the only one left alive, Katharine must act quickly to save him. YAs will be engrossed in the computer search for DNA codes, the strange prehistoric or not so prehistoric bones that Katharine unearths, and a mysterious underwater geode from outer space. There is enough adventure and suspense in this thriller to capture the interest of even the most reluctant readers.Katherine Fitch, Lake Braddock Middle School, Burke, VA

AudioFile - Ruth P. Ludwig

Teenaged athletes aren't supposed to stop breathing air and start trying to live on exhaust fumes and ammonia. They aren't supposed to drop dead either. Saul's science thriller takes us to Maui, where archaeologist Katharine Sundquist has stumbled onto a terrifying project in the heart of the jungle. Unknowingly her son has found the project, too. Richard Ferrone's narration shines in its impeccable timing. Unfortunately, anyone who has made even a brief visit to the islands will cringe at his mispronunciations of the common Hawaiian words and city names sprinkled throughout the book. R.P.L. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

AudioFile - Melody Moxley