ASTEROIDS

In McCoy’s debut novel, a physicist discovers a deadly coverup of potentially earth-shattering proportions.

Astrophysicist Rick Munday works as an assistant professor at the California Institute of Technology, but today he’s mostly been refreshing his email to see if he’s been approved for a grant to fund his research into “potential risks to Earth from asteroids.” With his meager salary, he can barely provide for his wife, Courtney, and their twins, Alyssa and Ethan. His grant proposal, however, has caught the eye of a much more important organization—and soon, he gets dragged into a secret plot that leads to the highest levels of government. It turns out that asteroids have, in fact, been hitting Earth at an alarmingly fast rate, and the government is having a hard time trying to clean up evidence of their existence to avoid a panic. They’ve even made deaths from meteorite debris look like murder-suicides and covered up massive impacts in other countries. Now Rick is in their grasp, and he has to find a way to escape, get back home to his family, and warn the world of impending disaster before it’s too late. McCoy offers a hefty, in-depth adventure novel with a compelling premise. The overabundance of characters, though, may keep the book from turning into a favorite of disaster-fiction fans, as it becomes difficult to keep all the players straight. Minor and even throwaway figures receive an undue amount of attention, and the nearly constant character introductions in the first part of the novel adversely affect the pacing, making it slow going initially. Readers who persevere, though, will be rewarded with a truly original and creative plot, which makes the effort worthwhile.

An unevenly executed but well-plotted disaster novel that may have readers looking to the skies in fear of what’s to come.