Heroin(e): Entropy

by Gordon Graham

In the year 2002, the economy has taken a sharp downturn. There's a new report of a sniper attack downtown nearly every day, and Dick Cheney's first term in office has quickly turned the US into a totalitarian state.

Blake Rice, an ex-SEAL, and his protégé are on a cross-state killing spree, and no one knows why. They've made no demands, and their targets seem random. No one knows who they are or why they've suddenly become so violent. No one, that is, but the creators of the synthetic drug x-2317.

Despite all of that, Nina feels blessed to escape poverty after graduating college and getting a high-salary job, along with moving into a cozy DC apartment with her attractive, driven boyfriend. But when Konrad becomes violent and delusional, he drugs Nina with x-2317; a compound that changes both of their lives. Overnight, they gain superhuman intelligence and preternatural decision making ability, and become pawns in a multidimensional game where their every move is manipulated by two opposing forces.

When the paths of these four pawns cross, it's up to Nina to end the game before the other players distribute a derivative of x-2317 worldwide. The more she fights to get out, the more she learns just how far-reaching the influence of the omnipresent game masters is. Faster, stronger, and smarter than ever before, can Nina find a way to end this game and keep her family safe before Konrad, or whoever is manipulating him, uses synthetic heroin to destroy the entire country?

444 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 3, 2017

About the author

Gordon Graham is Director of the Edinburgh Sacred Arts Festival. He previously taught philosophy at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, and Princeton Theological Seminary. The author of twenty books on a wide range of subjects in aesthetics, politics and moral philosophy, he has also published extensively on the Scottish philosophical tradition. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and winner of an Eighteenth Century Scottish Studies Society Lifetime Achievement Award, he was founding editor of the Journal of Scottish Philosophy and general editor of the Oxford History of Scottish Philosophy. His books include Scottish Philosophy after the Enlightenment (Edinburgh University Press, 2022).

Reviews

[Sinclair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really impressed with the immersive world that Graham created. A slick, Neo-historical fiction thriller set in a fictionalized version of the D.C. Sniper Crisis felt all too real, and to tie it in with the protagonist's struggle to dig her way out of synthetic drug operation her boyfriend entrapped her in was genius. Can't wait to read his second book in the series Hermetic. Five stars