THE CONJURER'S TALE

An astrophysicist with a surprising new ability fights against a group that threatens to bring down society in Schrijver’s debut thriller.

David Haas comes back from an expedition to French Guiana with a strange condition that later becomes known as the Scourge. At first, the fungal infection enables him to make others see what he sees and duplicate his movements. Journalist Kara Burke, his colleague on his South American mission, finds out about his new powers and invites him to meet some mind readers in Paris. David discovers a connection between these telepaths and Alexander Cross, who fell into a coma on that same French Guiana trip and subsequently disappeared from a Paris hospital. It turns out that the Scourge has turned Alexander into the megalomaniacal gang leader Lucifer, who’s been turning telepaths and conjurers into his own personal army, which he hopes will infect humanity and take over the world. He kidnaps David, but before Lucifer can turn him, he manages to escape. To combat Lucifer’s forces, David and the French army seek to recruit their own superpowered troops and create new technology, but will that be enough to avert disaster? In a world that’s still dealing with a lingering pandemic, readers will find that Schrijver’s book is certainly timely, and he takes the clever approach of cobbling together a history of the Scourge based on David’s recollections (“Hopefully, time has dulled the sharpest edges. I’ll find out”), with his adult grandchild’s investigations filling in gaps in his memory. The narrative jumps around somewhat, echoing the chaos of David’s mind. He, Kara, and their mind-reading acquaintances are characters worth rooting for, although their helpful military allies don’t stick around for long. Lucifer doesn’t come across as a stereotypical megalomaniacal villain, as he receives a healthy amount of complex characterization. It all results in an engaging story of a scrappy group of underdogs who must find a way to save the world.

An often gripping novel of a superpowered scientist.