Crescent City Rhapsody Book

It begins with silence. A powerful electromagnetic pulse high in the atmosphere triggers a communications blackout, causing electronics and computers to fail the world over. In that moment of anachronistic quiet, a brilliant astronomer named Zeb Aberly, scouring the heavens with equipment of his own design, makes the discovery of a lifetime: the pulse originated in space--and it carried a message from an intelligent source. But Zeb is not alone. Shadowy forces within the government seek to decipher the message and to keep its existence secret at all costs. Fleeing for his life into the back streets and alleys of Washington, D.C., Zeb embarks on an odyssey that could cost him his family, his sanity, and everything he loves.

And it begins with murder. In New Orleans, mob boss Marie Laveau--a descendant of the famous voodoo priestess--is brutally gunned down by nameless, faceless enemies. But Marie's vast wealth has purchased the best life insurance of all: resurrection. Reborn by means of nanotechnology, Marie discovers that her husband and young daughter were also hit, their bodies too badly damaged to be repaired. Now she will stop at nothing to track down and punish those responsible. But her quest will lead beyond vengeance, into the very technology that saved her...and a conspiracy linked to the mysterious event now known as the Silence.

Recurring at unpredictable intervals, the Silence renders electronic-based technology unreliable and dangerous. A substitution must be found before civilization collapses; breakthroughs in nanotech and advances in genetic engineering give hope of a new kind of communication in the future. But now, as babies born aroundthe world in the months following the first Silence grow to adulthood, demonstrating uncanny physical and mental characteristics that bring suspicion and violence, nanotech plagues unleashed by ecoterrorists and fearful governments wreak havoc on an already panicked populace.

"Crescent City Rhapsody is marvelous! Goonan carves out her own future territory with passionate conviction; her Jazz novels show her to be a master of speculation and of character, as well."(— Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Greg Bear)

"Kathleen Ann Goonan has written a great big gumbo of a novel, full of freewheeling extrapolation and invention, where dozens of exotic people-whether they know it or not-help push humanity into a future of miraculous blinding clarity." (— Multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winner Joe Haldeman)

"Crescent City Rhapsody takes us into a 21st century made nearly unrecognizable by biotechnology, with exciting, disturbing, intriguing aspects. Anyone concerned with how our ideas and our very selves will change, as biology bites deep, should enjoy this swift, smart tale." (— Nebula Award-winning author Gregory Benford)