KILLING TIME by Caleb Carr - FIRST EDITION BOOK
2000 NY: Random House First edition, first printing, mint, new/unread in a flawless dustjacket.
It's clear that Caleb Carr hasn't just been killing time since the overwhelming success of The Angel of Darkness -- he's been looking toward the future. His latest, Killing Time, is a big shift in direction for Carr, for instead of conjuring the past to prowl the streets of Victorian-era New York City in search of a killer, Carr delivers to readers a dark vision of the future -- the year 2023.
Even though 1984 has come and gone, it's not too late to follow in the tradition of George Orwell and H. G. Wells, by evoking the world that is to come while commenting on society today. In Killing Time, Carr imagines a world in which rampant development of technology and abuses of power have propagated misinformation and historical revision. By 2023, the world is turned upside down -- disease has blighted Africa and Asia, the global economy has crashed, and the United States has seen the assassination of a female president, Emily Forrester, in 2018.
In this turbulent new world order, Dr. Gideon Wolfe, a professor at New York's John Jay University and an expert criminologist of the new millennium, has his own world turned upside down when the widow of a murdered special-effects wizard enters his office. She hands him a silver disc from her husband's safe deposit box, hoping that Wolfe's expertise in history and criminology will compel him to track down her husband's killers. The disc contains footage of President Forrester's assassination, the same video that has been broadcast countless times on TV and over the Internet -- with one crucial, shocking difference. This version shows that before the video was released, it was altered, with sinister special effects.
This explosive discovery will lead Gideon Wolfe on an electrifying journey from the criminal underworld of New York to the jungles of Africa, on a quest to find the truth in an age when all information can be manipulated. With this novel, Carr has boldly established a new genre -- future history -- combining the best elements of mystery and thrillers with unique historical insight. Breathtakingly suspenseful, Killing Time unfolds as the work of a master novelist. You won't want to waste another second - join Caleb Carr to chat about Killing Time.
