Amazonia

by James Rollins Narrated by John Meagher

Overview

“Gripping...a first-rate nail biter.”

*-Tampa Tribune

*

James Rollins-the author of The Doomsday Key, The Last Oracle, The Judas Strain, Black Order, and other pulse-pounding, New York Times bestsellers-carries readers into the heart of darkness in his classic thriller, Amazonia. Lincoln Child, New York Times bestselling co-author (with Douglas Preston) of Cemetery Dance and other Agent Pendergast thrillers, raves, “Amazonia grabs you by the throat and refuses to let go until the very last page is turned.”

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

The use of mass market originals as a farm team for hardcovers has lost popularity, but still works occasionally, as with Rollins, whose three mass markets (Deep Fathom, Excavation and Subterranean) displayed a flair for brawny adventure within an exotic locale a flair put to good use in his hardcover debut. A U.S. Special Forces agent walks out of the Amazon jungle and quickly dies of rampant tumors; what's especially bizarre is that this man has two arms, but when he entered the jungle five years before as part of a biopharmaceutical exploratory expedition, which has been lost track of, he had only one. The rest of the novel follows a group of scientists and U.S. military guardians as they trek deep into the jungle in search of the missing expedition and, hopefully, the secret to the regrown arm a secret that takes on vast importance when the dead agent's body, shipped to the States, spreads a disease that threatens to wipe out the American population. Meanwhile, a second, predatory expedition, led by a French psychopath, surreptitiously follows the first, aiming to steal whatever cure the searchers uncover; both expeditions wind up at the isolated home of a legendary tribe and the malignant, giant tree that sustains it. Rollins won't win awards for his prose or characters, though both function smoothly in this boldly drawn entertainment, and there's little here that isn't a variation of some classic adventure trope. His pacing is forceful, however, and his atmospherics rich, with giant caimans and jaguars, mutant amphibians and hungry locusts adding to the mayhem, a high body count and a congenial sense of the ridiculous although Rollins plays it deadpan. This is old-fashioned, rugged adventure in the tradition of Haggard and Crichton, told with energy, excitement and a sense of fun. (Mar.) Forecast: National print ads and California regional author appearances will win Rollins some fans, but the simultaneous release of 12-copy prepacks of his three mass markets manifest this novel's likely fate: respectable hardcover, bestselling paperback. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Workmanlike debut hardcover, a variation on King Solomon's Mines, this time set in the Amazon, where a search party seeks a bizarre protein that can kill and cure. Four years previously, ethno-botanist Nate Rand's father and a team of 30 researchers disappeared while on a mission into the rain forest. Now the CIA's Environmental Center wants to learn what fate befell the crew. They ask Nate and a team that includes an anthropologist, a shaman, and comely, auburn-haired Kelly O'Brien to find out. Adept at action scenes, Rollins keeps everything that follows sliding, swooping, and clawing at a steady, if ultimately wearying, pace. In the "eat-or-be-eaten world" of the rain forest come encounters with monstrous anacondas, dark storms of locusts, and leaping piranhas. This latter aberration, a mutation of sharks with frogs, apparently stemmed from an Amazonian tribe's use of a Jekyll-and-Hyde protein that both creates and kills other cells. Meanwhile, back at the CIA's Langley headquarters, Kelly's mother discovers that this same deadly element is spreading at home, threatening even Kelly's daughter, now fallen ill. And at the same time, in a back corner of the jungle, notorious soldier-of-fortune Louis Favre and his nasty accomplice Tshui, shrunken heads adorning her lithe, sinuous, seminude body, shadow Rand and company, setting them up for a deadly ambush at the site of a mysterious tree. Far-fetched as all this sounds, Rollins makes it by and large credible, sketching out as he does a convincing layer of myth to explain the tree's fantastic powers. And yet there's nary a shiver to be had. Sense of place is negligible, the armchair traveler never quite forgetting-well, the armchair. Punchybut scare-free. Still, there are enough cliffhangers here to keep a Saturday afternoon serial running for a year.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170267019
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/20/2009
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Amazonia

Chapter One

Snake Oil

August 6, 10:11 A.M.
Amazon Jungle, Brazil

The anaconda held the small Indian girl wrapped in its heavy coils, dragging her toward the river.

Nathan Rand was on his way back to the Yanomamo village after an early morning of gathering medicinal plants when he heard her screams. He dropped his specimen bag and ran to her aid. As he sprinted, he shrugged his short-barreled shotgun from his shoulder. When alone in the jungle, one always carried a weapon.

He pushed through a fringe of dense foliage and spotted the snake and girl. The anaconda, one of the largest he had ever seen, at least forty feet in length, lay half in the water and half stretched out on the muddy beach. Its black scales shone wetly. It must have been lurking under the surface when the girl had come to collect water from the river. It was not unusual for the giant snakes to prey upon animals who came to the river to drink: wild peccary, capybara rodents, forest deer. But the great snakes seldom attacked humans.

Still, during the past decade of working as a ethnobotanist in the jungles of the Amazon basin, Nathan had learned one important rule: if a beast were hungry enough, all rules were broken. It was an eat-or-be-eaten world under the endless green bower.

Nathan squinted through his gun's sight. He recognized the girl. "Oh, God, Tama!" She was the chieftain's nine-year-old niece, a smiling, happy child who had given him a bouquet of jungle flowers as a gift upon his arrival in the village a month ago. Afterward she kept pulling at the hairs on his arm, a rarity among the smooth-skinned Yanomamo, andnicknamed him Jako Basho, "Brother Monkey."

Biting his lip, he searched through his weapon's sight. He had no clean shot, not with the child wrapped in the muscular coils of the predator.

"Damn it!" He tossed his shotgun aside and reached to the machete at his belt. Unhitching the weapon, Nathan lunged forward'but as he neared, the snake rolled and pulled the girl under the black waters of the river. Her screams ended and bubbles followed her course.

Without thinking, Nathan dove in after her.

Of all the environments of the Amazon, none were more dangerous than its waterways. Under its placid surfaces lay countless hazards. Schools of bone-scouring piranhas hunted its depths, while stingrays lay buried in the mud and electric eels roosted amid roots and sunken logs. But worst of all were the river's true man-killers, the black caimans — giant crocodilian reptiles. With all its dangers, the Indians of the Amazon knew better than to venture into unknown waters.

But Nathan Rand was no Indian.

Holding his breath, he searched through the muddy waters and spotted the surge of coils ahead. A pale limb waved. With a kick of his legs, he reached out to the small hand, snatching it up in his large grip. Small fingers clutched his in desperation.

Tama was still conscious!

He used her arm to pull himself closer to the snake. In his other hand, he drew the machete back, kicking to hold his place, squeezing Tama's hand.

Then the dark waters swirled, and he found himself star ng into the red eyes of the giant snake. It had sensed the challenge to its meal. Its black maw opened and struck at him.

Nate ducked aside, fighting to maintain his grip on the girl.

The anaconda's jaws snapped like a vice onto his arm. Though its bite was nonpoisonous, the pressure threatened to crush Nate's wrist. Ignoring the pain and his own mounting panic, he brought his other arm around, aiming for the snake's eyes with his machete.

At the last moment, the giant anaconda rolled in the water, throwing Nate to the silty bottom and pinning him. Nate felt the air squeezed from his lungs as four hundred pounds of scaled muscle trapped him. He struggled and fought, but he found no purchase in the slick river mud.

The girl's fingers were torn from his grip as the coils churned her away from him.

No...Tama!

He abandoned his machete and pushed with his hands against the weight of the snake's bulk. His shoulders sank into the soft muck of the riverbed, but still he pushed. For every coil he shoved aside, another would take its place. His arms weakened, and his lungs screamed for air.

Nathan Rand knew in this moment that he was doomed — and he was not particularly surprised. He knew it would happen one day. It was his destiny, the curse of his family. During the past twenty years, both his parents had been consumed by the Amazon forest. When he was eleven, his mother had succumbed to an unknown jungle fever, dying in a small missionary hospital. Then, four years ago, his father had simply vanished into the rain forest, disappearing without witnesses.

As Nate remembered the heartbreak of losing his father, rage flamed through his chest. Cursed or not, he refused to follow in his father's footsteps. He would not allow himself simply to be swallowed by the jungle. But more important, he would not lose Tama!

Screaming out the last of the trapped air in his chest, Nathan shoved the anaconda's bulk off his legs. Freed for a moment, he swung his feet under him, sinking into the mud up to his ankles, and shoved straight up.

His head burst from the river, and he gulped a breath of fresh air, then was dragged by his arm back under the dark water.

This time, Nathan did not fight the strength of the snake. Holding the clamped wrist to his chest, he twisted into the coils, managing to get a choke hold around the neck of the snake with his other arm. With the beast trapped...

Amazonia. Copyright © by James Rollins. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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