Journey of the Dead: The Trinity Conspiracy, Book 1
In Journey of the Dead, the first book in A. C. Townsend’s unusual and ultimately highly readable Trinity Conspiracy series, sixteen-year-old Sarah Davenport and her family are part of a group of people who are trekking through the American desert when suddenly ‘the world erupted without warning’: they’ve been caught near ground zero by an atomic bomb blast. The US military takes them into custody in a hidden facility in order to study the effects of nuclear radiation on their bodies and minds – and some of those effects are startling to say the least.
Townsend follows the fates of Sarah and her friends through twists and turns that intersect cannily with some of the iconic, mysterious government-related incidents of the latter half of the 20th century including, as this first volume is drawing to an end, the crash of an alleged alien spacecraft at Roswell, New Mexico.
Townsend’s blending of historical fiction, science fiction, and inspirational fiction can at times feel haphazard and imperfectly controlled, and her core characters act weirdly stilted long before they’re heavily irradiated, but the book’s basic premise is intriguing enough to make me look forward to the next volume.
