Maelstrom (Rifters, #2)

What if you did something horrible to save the world? Horrible in the sense of nuclear explosions that cause tsunamis, killing countless people and displacing others? Would you be able to live with yourself and the knowledge of those sacrifices you made, and of the lives you crushed for the greater good?

Worse: what if your plan didn't work?

It's a horrible, horrifying question, and it's at the heart of Maelstrom, which picks up right were Starfish (Watts' previous book) left off. As in the first book, Watts does an excellent job of blending the epic (the efforts of the powers that be to stop Lenie Clarke's Typhoid Maryesque spreading of unkillable contagion across North America) with the intensely personal (Lenie struggling to put her life back together).

The only problem with Maelstrom is that Watts paints a picture of humanity so bleak, so corrupt, that by the end you're actually cheering for the ßehemoth to spread, because clearly we have no future as a species. Balancing that, though, is the knowledge that this isn't the end of the series - there's still another book to go, and from here humanity has nowhere to go but up.