

Shannon Moss is a federal law enforcement agent for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) in 1997. Such is The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. Not only does it suck you in from the onset, enthralling you with its killer premise and even more promising characters–this particular breed of novel manages to deliver on all of that potential, and rock your fucking world.

Let me begin this review with some level-setting: Every once in a while, you read a book that is special. Luminous and unsettling, The Gone World bristles with world-shattering ideas yet remains at its heart an intensely human story. To her horror, the future reveals that it’s not only the fate of a family that hinges on her work, for what she witnesses rising over time’s horizon and hurtling toward the present is the Terminus: the terrifying and cataclysmic end of humanity itself. Moss knows first-hand the mental trauma of time-travel and believes the SEAL’s experience with the future has triggered this violence.ĭetermined to find the missing girl and driven by a troubling connection from her own past, Moss travels ahead in time to explore possible versions of the future, seeking evidence to crack the present-day case. Libra-a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time.

Though she can’t share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship U.S.S. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL’s family-and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Inception meets True Detective in this science fiction thriller of spellbinding tension and staggering scope that follows a special agent into a savage murder case with grave implications for the fate of mankind… “I promise you have never read a story like this.”-Blake Crouch, New York Times bestselling author of Dark Matter
