Novel barrels along — until it doesn’t
"Year One," Nora Roberts' new work of speculative fiction, begins with the deaths of 5 billion people — about as many books as the queen of romance has sold.
The trouble starts when, during a family vacation in Scotland, Ross MacLeod — later known as "Patient Zero" — shoots a pheasant that lands inside a cursed circle of stones.
Alas, when the MacLeods fly home to the United States, they spread a magical flu virus to everyone on the plane. Within days, hundreds of millions are dying. Governments collapse.
Roberts sketches this disaster in quick strokes while following the lives of ■ her many central characters. At the center is Lana, a New York sous chef who recently started dating Max, a famous writer. He has been training Lana in magick, and the only thing hotter than their sex life is their witchcraft: They can light candles with their breath.
As the epidemic takes down civilization, faeries, elves, sirens and sorcerers begin to appear — like the whole catalog of a new-age gift store come to life.
There's no easy way to tell who's a regular human and who's an Uncanny. Worse, there's no way to distinguish the good guys from the evil freaks (until they eviscerate you, which is too late).
After publishing more than 200 novels, Roberts knows how to spellbind an audience. "Year One" hurries along for a few hundred pages with heartbreaking losses, hair-raising escapes and gruesome attacks. There's also cute flirting between good-looking characters because "every day, in the midst of tragedy and despair, people go on."
But once the characters start rebuilding, the plot shifts down from the thrill of apocalyptic disaster to the tedium of inventory control: a lot of whiny discussions about conserving electricity, divvying up kitchen duties and figuring out who stole the Doritos.
Roberts seems unwilling to imagine just how radically civilization would react.
"Year One" is the first volume in a planned trilogy, which should have given her ample room to explore what caused the epidemic, who the fantastical creatures are, and how sociological structures are mutating. But you'll have to buy volume two — and perhaps volume three, too — to get answers.