SCIENCE FICTION
The Devil’s Eye by Jack McDevitt (Ace, $24.95).
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Politics. There’s no escaping its ugliness even on a world several light-years outside the Milky Way galaxy.
That world is Salud Afar, and it’s where celebrated horror writer Vicki Greene has gone to research her next novel. Once there she sends a burst of a message to antiquities dealer Alex Benedict. It ends with, “They’re all dead.” Then Greene’s memory is wiped.
But Greene had asked Benedict and his assistant, Chase Kolpath, for help. She had also paid. A lot. So they go into “The Devil’s Eye.”
This latest of McDevitt’s Alex Benedict novels — his “Seeker” won a 2006 Nebula Award — retains the author’s ability to ground his speculative fiction in human manipulations, in this case a pandemic that needs that most political of necessities: a cover-up.
As we watch a galactic disaster unfold through Chase’s eyes, we also see an administration that is slow to react. When McDevitt uses a phrase such as, “We were sitting on top of a tidal wave,” the allusion to Hurricane Katrina is complete.
