Benjamin Percy in Conversation With Victor LaValle

It began with a comet… At first, people gazed in wonder at the radiant tear in the sky. A year later, the celestial marvel became a planetary crisis when Earth spun through the comet’s debris field and the sky rained fire. The town of Northfall, Minnesota, will never be the same. Meteors cratered hardwood forests and annihilated homes, and among the wreckage a new metal was discovered. This “omnimetal” has properties that make it world-changing as an energy source… and a weapon. John Frontier — the troubled scion of an iron-ore dynasty in Northfall — returns for his sister’s wedding to find his family embroiled in a cutthroat war to control mineral rights and mining operations. His father rightly suspects foreign leaders and competing corporations of sabotage, but the greatest threat to his legacy might be the U.S. government. Physicist Victoria Lennon was recruited by the Department of Defense to research omnimetal, but she finds herself trapped in a laboratory of nightmares. And across town, a rookie cop is investigating a murder that puts her own life in the crosshairs. She will have to compromise her moral code to bring justice to this now lawless community. In his gut-punch of a novel, The Ninth Metal (Houghton Mifflin), the first in his Comet Cycle, Benjamin Percy (author of Red Moon and The Wilding) lays bare how a modern-day gold rush has turned the middle of nowhere into the center of everything, and how one family — the Frontiers — hopes to control it all. Percy will be joined in conversation by Victor LaValle, author of The Changeling and The Ballad of Black Tom.

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