This Shoal of Space

Zöe Calla is a struggling young obituary writer with a burning ambition to become a big-time news reporter. She also has a burning need to save earth from alien invaders, maintain her sanity, prevent her son Max from a cancer relapse, make the world a better place, and find fresh love anew. She seeks all this in her sleepy little home town, San Tomas, where nothing ever happens.When she stumbles upon a strange and eerie series of murders at the zoo, she soon figures out that she is up to her eyebrows in a galactic conspiracy that nearly ended 100 million years ago, in the crash of a starship from far away in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way)......Except now the starship is putting itself together again, to finish eradicating all earthly life, and replace it with alien plants and animals. The vast ship starts to rebuild itself, using networked PCs tied to an intergalactic cruiser's ferromagnetic memory core buried in the ocean. The ship uses Virtual Reality (VR) to link its scattered pieces, with certain human brains (including Zöe 's) as accidental but necessary nodes to get the job done. Sitting in a metaphorical pool at the back of Zöe Calla's brain is a Cold Thing, much like an eel, linked with other intelligences plotting the end of all life on earth as we have known it.Zöe 's life was complicated enough to begin with. Her late husband was a violent, drug-abusing biker, who beat her and murdered people. Frank MacLemore is dead now, but seems to continue riding around in neighboring dimensions with his buddies, scaring anyone brave enough to be up that late at night (e.g., reading this novel).Zöe is a sharp-tongued, sassy ray of sunshine, a young widow - the beautiful butterfly nobody seems able to catch - whose two recent romantic interests have been Det. Vic Lara, a handsome but sinister cop; and then there's a possible shining knight in Dr. Roger Chatfield, zoo curator, widower, father of hyper-active Rudy and quietly beautiful, dark-haired Elisa. Roger's kids befriend Max, even as Zöe is investigating zoo murders and running afoul of the Burtongale family, founders of the zoo and owners of practically everything in San Tomas.While Roger courts Zöe - taking her out for dinner, moonlight by the Bay, and Tango dancing - the kids become secretly hooked on a scary, deadly, networked computer game hosted by a virtual alien named Captain Colorado, whose home port is out in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud (a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way).The zoo, where Zöe is researching her story, is populated by soulful animals like Winky the broken-winged parrot, Adolph the headachy gorilla, and thousands of hairy spiders, to name just a few. The hovering, ghostly Pilot, a horrid avatar of the alien race, uses such animals to kill people who get in the way of its rebuilding program. If you think these are spoilers, don't worry - we're just getting started on one of the wildest rides in SF history. We haven't even mentioned the satanic serial killers headed by billionaire Gilbert Burtongale, who stands to inherit almost everything in San Tomas - and wants Zöe Calla for his immortal bride amid Lesser Magellanic magic.Can Zöe Calla tackle the universe and succeed in her many-tentacled quest - to stay alive, save her son, get a real job, keep her impossible mother happy, save Earth from alien invasion, and find fresh new love - all on this distant, forlorn shoal of infinite and eternal space? The answers are in this novel.