Starred Review, Publishers Weekly

The planet is called Null. It is a desert wasteland devoid of life. However, a marooned crew from earth is about to learn that it is also a planet that goes through a radical seasonal and ecological change every four years. Among this crew is a young girl named Sascha who will be swept up in the transformation.

To escape the ravages of the season, an indigenous alien culture is sequestered in an underground labyrinthine habitat. Eli Dammond, a disgraced army captain arriving to rescue the marooned crew, must penetrate the alien world and return from the depths to save the human outpost on the surface from certain annihilation.

Reeve Calder has spent his life on a space station, watching as terraforming gradually fails on his home planet of Lithia, dooming the colonists below. But now he is forced among their midst to pursue Gabriel Bonhert, captain of the station, who has set in motion a world cataclysm, using a probe that will travel down a deep mantle plume.

Reeve races against time to reach Bonhert’s base at a remote volcanic gateway to the heart of Lithia. His staunchest ally is a feral girl whose past holds the key to startling possibilities. Reeve forges onward, encountering desperate human enclaves and an alien race that both enslaves humanity and holds out the promise of a terrible transformation.

When Abbey McCrae’s teenage daughter dies mysteriously, everyone calls it suicide. But Abbey believes it’s murder, somehow connected to her daughter’s addiction to Nir, a virtual reality game. As more and more townspeople fall under Nir’s spell, Abbey and a cynical detective named Simon Haskell uncover a horrifying conspiracy involving the game, a charismatic leader named Zachariah Smith, and an alien race desperate to solve its galactic problems at the expense of an unsuspecting earth.