Partholon (Krauss)

The Twin Towers are still smoldering, when those odd little anthrax letters show up, killing a few people here and there. Some nutcase, everyone thinks, but everyone's wrong - it's a setup, a precursor to a massive biological attack that leaves the Northeast a quarantined wasteland. Campus policeman John Rashkil, trapped inside the Zone, chooses to keep doing his job, adding judge and executioner to his resume. He builds a jury-rigged life from what he can salvage and attempts to help his teenage son avoid the bear-traps set throughout this new Byzantine America. But, a growing sense of futility shatters his confidence, and he is unprepared, when a rabble army seeks to break quarantine and pour into the uninfected lands. Based on an Irish legend of the same name, Partholon is a brutal look at how the just and the civilized respond to anarchy. It will delight lovers of action and military science fiction, like John Scalzi's Old Man's War or Robert Ferrigno's Prayers for the Assassin.

Twenty years after the events of Tu'an, Collier Rashkil runs an intelligence network out of an underground church in the northern Shenandoah Valley. A hundred miles or so south, Henry Price runs a smuggling ring. Neither is aware the other survived the horrific last stand of the Ghosts. Life is hard: Collier is proscribed, Henry is one-step ahead of arrest and execution, yet both have a measure of contentment. But, then an old enemy confronts Collier as a new enemy attacks Henry, and a war already lost threatens to reignite and finish them, their families, and what's left of the country.