THE SHORT OF IT:
The world lurches toward nuclear Armageddon. A mysterious evangelist-gone-terrorist with supernatural origins hopes to usher in a biblical apocalypse using stolen atomic warheads. Three stand against him, a seer of good and evil, her academic beau, and a disaffected FBI agent. They and the villain may be emissaries of God, but who, in these times, does God truly favor?
THE LONG OF IT:
Almost a thousand years ago, a Catholic seer experienced a vision. He was blessed with insight into the identities of every pope from that time to the end of days. He wrote these impressions down in the form of short, cryptic phrases, which were subsequently forgotten, buried for centuries in the Vatican Secret Archives.
Five hundred years later, these “Prophecies of the Popes” were rediscovered and found to show incredible accuracy. They also offered terror, as among the predictions was that of the final pontiff of the Church, who would see Rome burned and the coming of Judgment Day.
That final pope would be Francis, elected to his high office on March 13, 2013.
At a quick glance, these prophecies seem terrifying indeed. They seem to garner an authority mustered only through the supernatural. There is only one thing wrong with the prophecies: they were entirely made up. In an attempt to influence a Papal conclave of the time, a monk in the 1500s invented all those predictions up to his time, attributed them to a holy man from five hundred years earlier, then added a bunch of new ones, as well. Among the new “predictions” was one suggesting the monk’s own candidate for the papacy at that time. See, if your man was prophesied to be elected... More important for us, the final falsified prediction was for the Pope Petrus Romanus, whose office would usher in the Christian apocalypse sometime in the second decade of the 21st century.
So, who cares? A faked list of predictions happens to come to a close during our time, purporting to usher in the end of the world? Good for a few laughs, right? Except that an awful lot of people actually believe the prediction. Having been robbed of an expected end of the world in 2000, in 2001, and again with the supposed Mayan apocalypse of 2012, those who crave the end times have latched onto this dubious vehicle for bringing the world to its finish. They are themselves laughable, even pathetic, and are not taken seriously by rational men, even by most irrational ones.
But, what if they were? What if the constantly stoked engines of televangelism and doomsaying, starved always for money and validation, took hold of the Prophecies of the Popes and hammered them against their gullible supporters, forging a frenzy of apocalyptic doom during the next few years of Pope Francis’s reign?
What if they tried to help along that doom?
Now, that would be interesting.
That’s what happens in LAST DAYS AND TIMES, a contemporary fantasy thriller likened by readers to the work of Dean Koontz and Dan Brown.
In LAST DAYS AND TIMES, the world panics as mankind perceives itself rushing toward apocalypse. Fundamentalists and new age thinkers of all stripes are convinced the world will end, thanks to the advent of the 266th and final pope. Leveraging that hysteria, Arthur Davidson, a radio evangelist, rises to prominence while promising salvation through him alone.
Unknown to everyone, Davidson is a 2000-year-old Roman legate forced by Jesus Christ himself to live and see the end times happen.
Immortality has been unkind to Davidson. After centuries of watching loved ones die, after living outside the order of man, he has been driven mad. He is determined to force the apocalyptic prophecies of the Bible to fruition in a hope to end his tortured existence. His “suicide weapon” is nuclear terrorism. He procures ten tactical atomic warheads stolen from a Russian Army facility and attempts to use the nukes to further his plan to bring about the end of time.
The legate’s nemesis is Sally Reiser, a Jewish girl disillusioned with God, whom she blames for the handicap of her six-year-old autistic son. She’s the last of a line of Jewish seers, a family gifted to see the work of God, no matter how beautiful or terrible. Sally allies with an unlikely hodgepodge of Davidson’s enemies. Gary LaMonte, Sally’s boyfriend, is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Religion who has written a thesis on post-millennialism, the effect of the dawning millennium on the mass psyche. Rosa Vasquez is the FBI’s lead agent in the government’s fight against Davidson’s shadow terrorist network, code-named Bible Scholar. John Bennington leads a dark network of his own, engaged for centuries against the Antichrist, as he sees Davidson. Together, these imperfect heroes combat the immortal’s mad plans, risking everything to save the planet, save each other, and save the anchors of their souls.
LAST DAYS AND TIMES is a thriller set against a realistic background of modern urban fantasy. This novel should appeal not only to thriller and fantasy readers, but to a wide range of adult readers intrigued by the regular recurrence of post-millennial fever. If you wonder about the nature of love, the nature of God, the place of religion, politics, money, and race in society, you will find an engaging story in LAST DAYS AND TIMES.
Urban Fantasy - Adult themes - Language - Action/fantasy violence