The Serpent Underneath

Twenty years after the American collapse, a new government pursues the common good, offering safety in return for compliance. Taken from the outskirts as a youth, Haven Segreti is forced to conform and serve as a member of an elite administrative pack behind the Community walls of the New Republic. She now faces life-altering choices, torn between an illicit liaison with her mentor, Adrien, and a chance of a deeper connection with a troubled young man set on revenge; between submitting to the world of oppressive control or risking everything to rebel against it; and between helping her friends flee to a better future or saving the family she left behind from an elite leadership intent on their destruction. Her pack leader, Adrien, the complex protege of the President of the Ruling Council, hides a dark intellect behind a mask of conformity, manipulating people and circumstances towards his own subversive ends. Adrien may prove a valuable ally or take them all down in an expression of violent dissonance. To the West, Nathan wakes from an extended coma to find his nation gone, replaced by a treacherous land, ravaged by an ancient and terrible contagion and oppressed by a new tyranny. Nathan travels east in search of a son he didn't know he had and a former co-worker, Haven's mother, Alexandra, whose family compound he hopes survived the collapse. However, his incursion into the New Republic has not gone unnoticed and will put him and anyone who helps him in grave danger as their stories dramatically converge. Drawn from today's most contentious social and political conflicts, this modern dystopian thriller plays American philosophy against its harshest adversaries in a terrifying vision of a future we may be unable to avoid.