The ubiquitous Patterson reteams with Barker, the author of the 4MK trilogy, for this SF/horror/thriller blend. In Oregon, at a site near Mount Hood, two sisters, one 16 and one 8, narrowly survive a catastrophic event that levels their village and, apparently, kills the rest of its people. Soon, government agents swoop down on the area, along with a team of civilian experts. Their mission: find out what happened and determine how to prevent it from happening again. This is a really entertaining thriller; the authors pull the reader in with a series of intriguing questions, and, as they answer one of them, they pose new ones. The pacing is very good, too: like Michael Crichton (who might have written something very like this), Patterson and Barker keep ratcheting up the suspense and the sense of impending doom, until, by the end, we wish we could read faster just so we can find out what happens next.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Virtually any book with Patterson's name on the cover is a best-seller. More than many of them, this one deserves to be.

Taking his first trip to the Pacific Northwest, Patterson introduces readers to 16-year-old Tennant, who is checking rabbit traps with little sister Sophie when they hear a mysterious vibration rising to a shriek in the woods. Their father shoves them into the storm cellar, and when the two girls emerge, 1,000 people are dead. With a 460,000-copy first printing.

Bestseller Patterson and Barker follow 2020's The Coast-to-Coast Murders with a tired variation on a familiar theme--a baffling phenomenon devastates a community, triggering a massive government response to contain the truth and limit the loss of life. Sisters Tennant and Sophie Riggin live with their parents in a survivalist community near Oregon's Mount Hood. When a sudden, horribly painful noise disrupts the girls while they are hunting rabbits, their parents lock them in a cellar for protection. Then eight-year-old Sophie starts bleeding, curses her 16-year-old sibling, and turns violent. Meanwhile, psychologist Martha Chan is dragooned by the military to join a team of experts including a biologist, a climatologist, and an astrophysicist to determine what flattened part of the nearby forest and crushed all living things in that area. What they find leads to the direct involvement of the American president, as well as a cardinal who's "the highest-ranking member of the Catholic Church in the United States." The implausible plot suffers from a lack of characterization and suspense. Other authors have done better with similar material. (Aug.)