8.4 by Peter Hernon (August 2012)
Requirements: ePUB Reader | 14.75 Mb
Overview: The stories are the stuff of legend, and they are all true. In 1811 and 1812, three mammoth earthquakes measuring 8 on the Richter scale ruptured an area spanning twenty-four states and a third of the landmass of the United States (the New Madrid Seismic Zone), creating lakes in Tennessee and causing the Mississippi River to run backward. But today it’s all a distant memory. In Peter Hernon’s novel, 8.4, the New Madrid awakens, threatening the country with systematic collapse…
- * Near Mayfield, Kentucky, John Atkins, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, witnesses a tremor that stops him cold. The earth suddenly liquefies in fountains of mud and foul-smelling water. A church steeple topples; a graveyard is torn asunder.
* In Memphis, Atkins meets Elizabeth Holleran, a forensic seismologist, who has uncovered data showing a series of ominous simultaneous events: an uplift of the earth’s crust, an unusually strong lunar pull, and near-record flood stages along the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. She’s convinced a major earthquake is imminent. History is about to repeat itself.
Atkins and Holleran believe their only hope is a mission deep into the earth to stop the geological time bomb. Joining forces with an elderly physicist, they descend into one of the Midwest’s deepest coal mines. Unknown to Atkins, a colleague is willing to kill to stop him. It’s up to a team of scientists to stop the impending destruction, working against nature, time, and a horrifying, human-made conspiracy. With cutting-edge science and unerring authenticity, Peter Hernon has crafted a novel of nerve-jangling suspense you will not soon forget.
Genre: Fiction, Thriller
"A cataclysmic moment in American history is about to repeat itself in this white-knuckle disaster thriller. Signs point to a contemporary recurrence of the devastating earthquakes that, in 1811 and 1812, ripped through the New Madrid Fault Zone, 140 miles of American heartland along the Mississippi River. Marina owner Lauren Mitchell discovers huge cracks in the Kentucky Lake Dam. Seismologist John Atkins, haunted by the tragic loss of his lover during the 1985 Mexico quake, witnesses abnormal animal activity on a visit to the University of Memphis. When beautiful West Coast seismologist Elizabeth Halloran supplies evidence that upcoming sunspots will trigger the New Madrid Fault, Atkins is still a little skeptical — until the first quake hits at Richter 8.4. After that, amid the chaos that engulfs the ruins of Memphis, the race is on to prevent the next quake in the sequence – if there is a sequence – with a daring and dangerous plan. No tale about science’s dash to save civilization from nature would be complete without a contingent of pig-headed and skeptical bureaucrats foiling the protagonists’ heroics; in this case a sycophantic group of earthquake experts who naysay the probability of another big shake-up. Hernon (Earthly Remains) heightens the scuffle with a believable turf conflict between state authorities and the federal government. The scenes of devastation are both horrifying and awe-inspiring, and although at times Atkins is surprisingly naive about the impending quakes’ telltale signs (hibernating frogs evacuating their winter habitats, for example), the characters are, for the most part, believable. The end result is a combination of science and thrills that compares favorably with the best of Michael Crichton, but with a decidedly warmer touch. Hernon’s saga, with its meticulous seismic details and galvanizing descriptive immediacy, brings a human angle to the technology of natural disaster." ~Publishers WeeklyDownload Instructions:
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