The Second Angel (Paperback)

Kerr's blinding attention to detail (he includes a complicated series of footnotes explaining how mankind reached this soulless point), and his own lack of feeling for the characters he has created, is initially disconcerting. But as the story develops, the reader is compelled to live through this all-consuming thriller, coming to terms with the idea that Kerr's vision of the future may be more than just science fiction.

As the crew head to the moon to commit the crime of the century, the reader enters a miserable, bitter world (set just far enough in the future to be believable), where it is ever more difficult to discern what is good and what is evil, and where mankind is paying for mistakes that are all too familiar. --Susan Harrison --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review
Kerr has demonstrated his versatility as a writer, by producing everything from Hollywood-friendly thrillers such as Gridiron to more complex crime novels. This, however, is really quite unlike anything he has tackled before. It is 2069 and the end is looming for mankind. P2, a parvovirus, is afflicting 80 per cent of the population, and will kill them within ten years. The only cure is a replacement of all the contaminated blood, but the uninfected supplies are jealously guarded at the First National Reserve Bank. And here the SF elements really kick in, as the bank is on the moon, kept behind an array of impregnable security devices. Kerr's narrative has the man who designed the systems attempting to break into the supplies for his daughter, who has a rare genetic disorder. What lifts the narrative onto an even more intriguing plane is the presence of a mysterious entity, the eponymous Second Angel, watching the bank raid and engineering events on which the future of the human race depends. Millennial tensions are nicely invoked, and Kerr's synthesis of different elements produces a vigorous and stylish thriller. (Kirkus UK)

Unpredictable Kerr's latest (A Five-Year Plan, p. 287, etc.) is a wildly ambitious space opera set in a future grimly colored by the specter of an AIDS-like virus. A hundred years after the first moon landing, things aren't looking so rosy for planet Earth. Global warming has dumped tons of the Greenland ice cap into the Atlantic, killing the Gulf Stream that used to warm Europe. A painstaking series of footnotes explains why there are no dogs, no wine, no fertility for most men, and no hope for most people infected with P, a deadly virus that's stricken 80% of the population, prompting furious battles over control of the blood supply and unprecedented polarization of the human race. But life is good for Dana Dallas, the chief designer for Terotech, a firm that builds security systems for protecting precious stores of untainted blood, the basis of the 21st-century economy. Wealthy and successful, Terotech's golden boy and heir-apparent to the present CEO, Dallas has it made, until the one flaw in his otherwise perfect life turns him into a fugitive from justice, hunted by the law and by contract killers. Building an unlikely but familiar coalition of rebels - an ex-con pilot, a one-armed wife-murderer, a pair of professional criminals, and one of the killers Terotech has set on his trail - Dallas implausibly swears revenge on the system: he'll break into the impregnable First National Blood Bank on the moon and sell its vast reserves on the black market. Even though Dallas, who designed the security system for First National, knows its weaknesses better than anyone, his plan will require a harrowing stint in a virtual-reality simulator and a break-in endangering every one of his buddies. But who's the olympian narrator chronicling every step of this elaborate caper? Cobbling together leftovers from Robert Heinlein and The 39 Steps, Kerr gilds them all with his trademark philosophical speculations and comes up with a story vastly more provocative in its vision of the politics of blood and cybernetics than its workaday plot would suggest. (Kirkus Reviews)

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