The Twelve

The Twelve is Justin Cronin's 2012 sequel to The Passage, published by Ballantine Books and the middle volume of a trilogy that closes with The City of Mirrors. Where the first book carried readers from a military virology programme in Colorado to a fortified colony a hundred years later, this one widens the frame again, moving between the opening days of the outbreak and the Second Viral War that consumes the continent nearly a century afterwards.

The early strand follows people the collapse caught in the open: Danny the bus driver, Kittridge the sniper holding a ruined Denver, and Lawrence Grey, whose part in the original experiment keeps pulling him back toward it. The later strand returns to Amy, Peter Jaxon and Alicia Donadio, who go on the offensive against the virals for the first time, infiltrating a dozen hives each ruled by one of the original Twelve. Alicia, transformed at the end of the first book into something half human and half viral, is both their sharpest weapon and the question the book keeps asking. The threads converge in the Homeland, a captive settlement in Iowa built on the wreckage of the old order.

Reviewers received it as a step up from its predecessor. The New York Times Book Review called it "a literary superthriller," and The Plain Dealer judged that it surpasses The Passage; critics repeatedly noted Cronin's balance of carefully made literary fiction against cliff-hanging plot. Its jumps across seventy-five and then twenty years divided readers, some finding the structure bracing and others disorienting, but the character work — Amy, Alicia, Grey — is what most reviews single out.