Burning Stones

Book excerpt: In a world already desolated by an avian influenza, paramedic Alex Gauthier's twenty-one-year-old daughter, Gemma, afflicted by the so-called Lucy virus, is devolving-turning into a proto human-while forest fires besiege the valley where they live. When Gemma asks Alex to kill her-perform a mercy killing-when she is no longer human, he finds himself making a promise he doesn't want to keep. At the other end of the valley, Veronica "Ronnie" Sapriken, the only remaining RCMP officer, is struggling to keep the peace in a disintegrating town while the rest of the world is falling apart, only to discover that someone has been trafficking in devolving kids. Locked away in a FEMA camp outside Spokane, Sage Van Peldt, whose husband and children were among the first to be infected with the strange virus, plans escape back to the valley of her childhood, not knowing whether she will survive the trip, or what she will find once she gets there. Burning Stones is the harrowing story of devolution, and of making choices no one wants to have to make.