DEVOURING WIND
(Book Two of the Exchange)
By Dale Cozort
Available at Amazon
235 pages
In book one of this series, a huge portion of Illinois was
transplanted to an alien world and vice versa.
The people, who chose to remain on that other, more hostile world,
tagged it Bear Country. By the end of
that first novel, there were two colonies of humans established in Bear Country. One made up of good people longing for a
simpler, more basic life and eager to recreate the old frontier spirit in
themselves. The other group was escaped
convicts from the Illinois State Prison, dozens of hardened murders, thieves
and rapists preferring this new savage land rather than return to their
incarceration back on our earth. The
book ended with survivor Sharon Mack and her fiancée, government agent Leo
West, resigned to the fact that eventually there would be a bloody
confrontation with the convicts to resolve which group would ultimately control
Bear Country.
With “Devouring Wind,” writer Dale Cozort picks up the story
of Bear Country and immediately adds a new wrinkle to his tale, aliens. Another “exchange” has occurred and this
time, rather than transferred another chunk of our familiar earth to Bear
Country, the unexplained phenomenon has brought over a piece of land from an
alien world. At its core is an ancient,
ruined city buried under a jungle of black vines. Both the settlers of Fort Egan, the frontier
community, and the convicts, under the leadership of Sam Kittle, see the new
alien presence as something dangerous; to be studied with extreme caution.
When surveyor drones fly out of those supposedly lifeless
buildings and begin scouting both camps, it soon becomes clear some manner of
automated alien machinery is still active in the ruins and poses a real threat
to all humans in Bear Country. In the
end both sides have no recourse but to form a shaky alliance to explore this
alien territory. All the while several
members of the convict town are plotting to overthrow Kittle and take control
of Fort Egan.
Sharon, her autistic daughter Bethany, and a former convict named Woody
are caught in the middle of these machinations doing their best to keep things
together while at the same time solve the mystery of what destroyed the alien
city and learn if it is still a viable danger to their own existence.
We’ve read lots of science fiction over the years with alternate
world themes but nothing quite like what Cozort has created in this highly
imaginative series. His characters are
wonderfully complex and their interactions with one another are the sparks that
fire up this storytelling engine. He
mixes human psychology with our understanding of social mores and from this
recipe offers up a truly thought-provoking adventure we thoroughly
enjoyed. Hopefully there is a book three
on the way. That would make us very
happy indeed.
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