cover image The Ark

The Ark

Boyd Morrison, . . Touchstone, $24.99 (432pp) ISBN 978-1-4391-8179-9

At the start of Morrison's debut, a routine quest thriller that attracted attention through Amazon's self-publishing Kindle program, combat engineer Tyler Locke executes a daring rescue after the helicopter carrying archeologist Dilara Kenner crash-lands in the sea near the floating oil rig where Tyler is working 200 miles off the Newfoundland coast. Dilara has come to enlist Tyler's help in finding Noah's ark, previously discovered by her father, Hasad Arvadi, who was murdered before he could announce this momentous find. Arvadi's killer, Sebastian Ulric, the head of a religious cult, plans to use a prion disease found on the ark as a weapon. Tyler, Dilara, and Tyler's sidekick, Grant Westfield, are all that stands between Ulric and the death of virtually every human on earth. Morrison breaks the story into several main sections involving various battles before finally honing in on what impatient readers will have been awaiting, the actual discovery of the ark. 5-city author tour. (May)