cover image The Demon Crown: A Sigma Force Novel

The Demon Crown: A Sigma Force Novel

James Rollins. Morrow, $28.99 (464p) ISBN 978-0-06-238173-6

Readers with insect phobias may want to avoid bestseller Rollins’s terrific 13th Sigma Force novel (after 2016’s The Seventh Plague). In 1903, Alexander Graham Bell is on a mission to Italy to retrieve the bones of James Smithson, the man who founded the Smithsonian Institution. Along with Smithson’s skeleton, Bell finds a pumpkin-sized chunk of amber containing a small dinosaur with a tiny crown of bones. Smithson’s diary warns: “what the Demon Crown holds is very much alive and ready to unleash the very hordes of Hell upon this world.” Sure enough, in the present, the secret cabal known as the Guild is about to unleash a massive infestation of giant killer wasps that, once established, will bring the world to its knees. Sigma Force commander Grayson Pierce and partner Seichan are on the beach in Hawaii when the first masses of unrelenting, venomous wasps swarm ashore. Soon all of Sigma Force is working to defeat the evil plan. The chapters written from the wasps’ point-of-view are particularly bone-chilling. [em]Agents: Russ Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency; and Danny Baror, Baror International. (Dec.) [/em]