Crisscross - A Repairman Jack Novel

On September 11, 2001, a man drifts in a boat off lower Manhattan as the towers burn. He removes a small box from his pocket and presses a button. As he waits for the south tower to collapse, he thinks: The vast majority will blame the collapse on the crazy Arabs who hijacked the planes and the Islamic extremists who funded them—the obvious choice. A few will notice inconsistencies and point fingers elsewhere, blaming the government or Big Oil or some other powerful but faceless entity. No one—absolutely no one—will guess the truth behind the who and why of this day.

Years later, someone does. Repairman Jack’s childhood friend, Weezy Connell (the genius girl from the Tor Teen novel, Jack: Secret Histories), has started fitting together the pieces of the puzzle and anonymously posting her conclusions on the Web. But she can’t stay anonymous forever. Someone is after her. Jack becomes involved in her troubles and in the paranoid mazes of the 9/11 Truth Movement, where conspiracy theories point in every direction.

They’re all wrong. The truth is stranger, darker, and more evil than anyone can imagine. It involves the cosmic shadow war into which Jack has been drafted. And if the plot behind it--millennia in the planning--succeeds, it will forever change life on this Earth.

When an ancient artifact dissolves in the hands of a man calling himself Mr. Veilleur, he knows something has gone wrong…terribly, cosmically wrong.

Dr. Roderick Hanley, Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, dies in a plane crash. His last words: “The boy! They’ll find out about the boy! He’ll find out about himself!” When Jim Stevens, an orphan and struggling writer, learns that he is the sole heir to the Hanley estate, he is sure he has at last found his biological father. But he’s only half right. The true nature of his inheritance—and the truth about his conception—will crush him.

In New York City a group of Charismatics has been drawn together—without invitation, simply showing up at a Murray Hill brownstone—with a sense of great purpose. Satan is coming, and they have been chosen to fight him.

Mr. Veilleur too has been drawn to the group, but he realizes it’s not Satan who is coming. Satan would be a suitable au pair compared to the ancient evil that is in the process of being Reborn.

Tor is reissuing the third title in the Adversary Cycle, The Touch, in July 2009.