Plates

About the Book

A terrifyingly believable world of massive earthquakes and exploding volcanoes is created in this mainstream thriller.  The initial setting is San Francisco, and the title is an allusion to tectonic plates.

The protagonist is Rick Albeglin, a geologist with the United States Geologic Survey.  The novel opens with Rick and his buddies on a golf course, but the reader soon learns that volcanoes are about to reappear in California.  An unusual earthquake near Monterey alerts Rick and the USGS to the onset of subduction, a geologic phenomenon where the Pacific plate dives beneath the North American continental plate.  With the geologic stage set for disaster, events race toward California’s first volcanic explosion in recorded history.  A new volcano blows in the High Desert northeast of Riverside on July 4th, and the terror begins.

Mind-numbing destruction culminates with a monstrous tsunami that decimates California’s population.  Traumatized survivors flee to the east.  But the earth’s destructive convulsions spread to the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, and a new ice age begins as volcanic debris causes a world-wide temperature drop and unparalleled precipitation.

Survivors are evacuated to Australia where a new society is born on that geologically stable continent.  The changed climate greens the former wasteland in the Outback, and a bright future for the refugees appears to be assured as the story draws to a close.  But the end of the novel is abrupt and so chilling that readers will flinch the next time they hear the earth has trembled.

About the Author

The author lives with his wife and two cats, Oscar and Felix, on the side of Red Mountain in the wilds of northern San Diego County. They share their idyllic surroundings with a handful of human neighbors, a resident mountain lion and a large pack of coyotes. When he isn’t writing, he and his wife play golf and visit family and friends around the country. He is a geologist whose career took him around the world several times. An avid fan of disaster novels and hard science fiction since he was a pre-teen, he devotes most of his writing time to those genres. He has a unique alternate world novel in progress, and he is about to resume work on a stem-winder disaster novel that envisions society’s collapse in a near-future world where the country’s economy is in shambles and illegal immigrants have overwhelmed society’s ability to care for them.