I have a bit of an ant problem at my house this summer. This book didn’t do anything to help that issue.
From the Back: A series of gruesome attacks have been sweeping New York City. A teacher in Harlem and two sanitation workers on Wall Street are found dead, their flesh ravaged and swollen bodies nearly dissolved from the inside out. The predator is a deadly supercolony of ants; an army of one trillion soldiers, with razor sharp claws that pierce skin like paper and burrow under flesh with stinging venom that liquefies its prey.
The desperate mayor turns to the greatest ant expert in the world, Paul O’Keefe, a Pulitzer Prize winning scientist in an Armani suit. But Paul is baffled by the ants. They are enormous and have no recognizable DNA. They appear to be vicious in the field, yet docile in the hand. When caught, they die within hours. Paul calls on the one person he knows can help destroy the colony, his ex-wife Kendra Hart, a spirited entomologist studying fire ants in the Nevada desert. Kendra is taken to a secret underground bunker in New York City, where she finds herself working side-by-side with her brilliant but arrogant ex-husband and a high-ranking military officer hell-bent on stopping the insects with nuclear weapons.
When the ants launch an all-out attack, Paul and Kendra hit the dangerous, panic-stricken streets of New York, searching for a coveted queen. It’s a race to unlock the secrets of this indestructible new species, before the President nukes Manhattan.
This is the first book written by AJ Colucci, and what a book it is. There are several factors that had me from beginning to end, not the least of which were the Driver ants, or Siafu.
Did I mention some can fly? Time to get scared.
These things have colonies in Africa that are in upwards of 20 MILLION ants. I thought the few that I’m killing every day in my kitchen were a lot!
Now imagine that someone has genetically altered them to be a little larger, attack humans, and inserted a queen into a colony in New York. You now have the perfect killing machine. These things will attack, sting, and liquify you from the inside out all in about 10 minutes. It’s painful, and I’m sure watching the ants literally crawling under your skin in the last paralyzing moments of your life isn’t too wonderful either.
The ants have essentially started eradicating humans from New York, and the Mayor has sent for the top two ant entomologists in the world to help figure out how to kill these things. Pesticides don’t work due to the way their exoskeleton has been evolved, and you can’t step on them and squish them…have you tried to kill 2 million ants with your foot at once?
The two entomologists, Paul and Kendra, just happened to have been married at one time and are now forced to work together again. Throw in someone whom Kendra had an affair with to help and you have a bit of a love triangle mixed in with the ants. The ants were more compelling. The biggest problem this book had was characterization. The love triangle just didn’t hold any weight, you didn’t care one way or the other. The focus was entirely on finding the cure, who did it and why. That’s not really a bad thing, just expect to care more about the victims of the ants than the central characters.
That being said though, the ants are the real stars of the book. This is more of a “monster movie” at it’s heart, but it’s plausible that this monster movie could happen. Everything here is well researched, it’s well explained, and based in fact. You will learn quite a bit about ants, how the colonies are constructed, and how they interact with the queens. The ants are gruesome, and provide enough of a gore factor to satiate the appetite of someone looking for gruesome deaths, but it’s restrained enough that your imagination will take you places you don’t really want it to go.
You get the feeling through reading this that this could be written for the big screen, and probably (should be) at the very least be a SyFy adaptation at some point. It has all the makings of one. Taught suspense, high action, gore, several different climaxes, a little bit of government conspiracy, and a large twist (you’ll either love it or hate it, no in between).
The Bottom Line: A first novel you say? Well done. I enjoyed this quite a bit despite my qualms with the characterizations. These monster siafu ants stole the show, and are creepy as hell. If you want something that is based in fact, well researched, exciting, fast moving and has Hollywood style, blockbuster events, then this book is for you. If you want something that is creepy, and will make you think twice about the ants you see, this book is for you. If you want something that has a bit of gore but leaves a bit to the imagination, again, this book is for you. I have a feeling you’ll move a little quick to get an ant off of you from here on out after reading this book. I bet you’ll even feel them crawling on you, and look and see nothing there.
Sleep tight!
You can pick this book up at amazon by clicking the book image above!
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A.J Colucci was born in the Bronx and raised in Larchmont, a suburb outside of New York City.
“I write stories that combine true science with the fast pace of a thriller,” she said. “The Colony is my first novel that explores the chilling side of some of earth’s most fearsome creatures; killer ants. Combined with a riveting story and compelling characters, the book has been described by best-selling author Steve Berry as, ‘Innovative, provocative and exciting’ but I would just call it a whole lot of fun.”
A.J. spent 15 years as a newspaper reporter, magazine editor and writer for corporate America. She has interviewed personalities as diverse as Bob Geldof, Erica Jong, Cal Thomas, Roy Orbison, Matt Dillon, General Westmoreland and Don McLean.
Today she is a full-time author and science geek who spends much of her free time reading stacks of novels, surfing the internet for the latest in technology, or clicking between the science and nature channels. She lives in New Jersey with her husband, two daughters and a couple of zazzy cats.
A.J. is a member of International Thriller Writers.