Peter Holt
ibooks, inc.
Genre: Thriller
Format: Hardcover (December 2005)

In the tradition of such NEW YORK TIMES best-selling authors as Clive Cussler and Michael Crichton comes a stunning new thriller of science, diving and the dangers of tampering with Nature....

We are all the product of evolution. Mutations and generations of breeding have altered our DNA, changed our programming, and overwritten the operating system that makes up each human being. But fragments of the old instructions remain; every living cell is a junkyard of lost programming and abilities. But just how lost are they?

When his lung-damaged daughter Katya lies at Death's door, Dr. Gastro Nister goes to extreme measures to save her, awakening a set of ancient genes left over from primeval times. Not only is she able to survive, but now she has astonishing new abilities...inhuman abilities. But these new abilities come with a price, one that Dr. Nister never envisioned.

When marine biologist Marcus Oden and his partner Nick Kondos come to a Pacific island to look for a missing deep-sea submersible, Marcus also continues his search for his missing wife, Callie, who'd vanished at sea years earlier. What they find first, though, is an island in turmoil. Paramount Chief Pelamundo, the native ruler of the island tribe, is fomenting an indigenous revolution, raising an army in the traditions of the "old ways," ways that include a return to cannibalism and dining on the "Long Pig." Aiding him in his rise to power is Dr. Nister and his daughter, Katya, now a beautiful and brilliant scientist, who have made a deal with the chief to assist in their research. In exchange for his protection, they have genetically "changed" hundreds of his supporters.

But they have also changed dozens of others, including many lost sailors whose ships were sunk...sometimes by nature, sometimes by the chief's men. For Marcus and Nick, caught up in the chief's revolution, the mystery of the missing submersible, Callie, and Dr. Nistor's research will all come together in a shocking revelation—a plan that goes far beyond an indigenous uprising and threatens the entire globe with a genetic future that will return Man to his most primitive past, to the sea from which we came, and a survival instinct that still harkens to us from our very DNA...