The Twelve

A bus driver named Danny, a sniper named Kittridge holding a ruined Denver, and a scientist named Lawrence Grey are all caught by the first days of a viral outbreak. Grey's part in the original experiment keeps drawing him back toward it. Their story is told alongside a second one, set nearly a century later.

In that later strand, Amy, Peter Jaxon and Alicia Donadio take the fight to the virals for the first time. Their plan is to infiltrate a dozen hives, each ruled by one of the original Twelve.

Alicia was transformed when the first book closed, and she is now part human and part viral. She is their sharpest weapon, and the question of what she has become runs through the whole book.

This is a post-apocalyptic horror thriller and the second volume of a trilogy, following The Passage and leading to The City of Mirrors. The Second Viral War consumes the continent in the later timeline. The two threads meet in the Homeland, a captive settlement in Iowa.

The Homeland stands on the ruins of the old order. The structure jumps between the opening of the outbreak and the war, across seventy-five years and then twenty. Some readers find that bracing and others find it disorienting. The book pairs a cliffhanger plot with careful character work, and Amy, Alicia and Grey carry much of the weight.