Presence » (Unabridged, 6 CDs, 7 hours)

House of Reckoning is John Saul’s thirty-sixth novel. His first novel, Suffer the Children, published in 1977, was an immediate million-copy bestseller. His other bestselling suspense novels include In the Dark of the Night, Perfect Nightmare, Black Creek Crossing, Midnight Voices, The Manhattan Hunt Club, The Right Hand of Evil, Guardian, and Faces of Fear. Saul divides his time between Seattle, Washington, and Hawaii.

Beyond the sparkling Hawaiian beaches, masked by the deceptive beauty of the rainforest, evil awaits sixteen-year-old Michael Sundquist and his mother, Katharine, an anthropologist who has come to the Islands to study the unusual skeletal remains unearthed on the volcanic flanks of Haleakala, Maui.

Yet far below the black depths of the Pacific a mysterious substance snakes through undiscovered fissures in the ocean floor, as nature itself seems to portend the terror to come.

Then, with the sudden, unexplained death of Michael’s friend, a disturbing truth dawns: the corporation that is funding Katharine’s dig has a far greater investment than she ever imagined - an investment in medical terror. And her son may be part of their hideous plan…

Publishers Weekly

Like the sinister scientists who figure so prominently in his fiction, Saul (Black Lightning) has perfected a formula: invent an eerie menace and drive home its horror by imagining its impact on an innocent and defenseless victim. In his 21st novel, that victim is Michael Sundquist, the teenage son of anthropologist Katharine Sundquist, who has recently relocated their family to Hawaii. Katharine has come to the islands to study anomalies of early human development found in the lava beds of Maui. She is quickly distracted from her work by Michael's suddenly worsening asthma attacks and by the inexplicable disappearance and death of several boys with whom he went on a secret nighttime scuba dive. It's only a matter of time before she discovers that her research and Michael's problems are interrelated through the Serinus Project, a covert scientific experiment funded by her employer for the purpose of investigating the genetic origins of human life. Katharine's struggle to save her son from becoming a guinea pig sacrificed in the name of science is classic Saul, a pell-mell race against the clock that pits warm human feeling against the cold and dispassionate vacuum of scientific inquiry. Although he breaks no new ground, Saul distills familiar elements of horror, science fiction and the cyberthriller into a potent brew.