“You can’t help getting caught up in the smartly-paced story…which is served up with lashings of steampunk relish.”
—SFX (UK)
“Rees makes the book work: the world he’s created is a psychopathic nightmare.”
—The Guardian
In the Demi-Monde, author Rod Rees has conjured up a terrifying virtual reality, a world dominated by history’s most ruthless and bloodthirsty psychopaths—from Holocaust architect Reinhard Heydrich to Torquemada, the Spanish Inquisition’s pitiless torturer, to Josef Stalin’s bloodthirsty right-hand man/monster, the infamous Beria. The Demi-Monde: Winter kicks off a brilliant, high concept series that blends science fiction and thriller, steampunk and dystopian vision. If Neil Gaiman, Neal Stephenson, James Rollins, and Clive Cussler participated in Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, the result might be something akin to the dark and ingenious madness of Rees’s The Demi-Monde: Winter.
The U.S. military created the Demi-Monde to train its soldiers in urban warfare. A virtual world of 30 million inhabitants ruled by cyber-duplicates of some of history's most dangerous psychopaths—from Grand Inquisitor Torquemada to fanatical Nazi butcher Rudolph Heydrich—it is a twisted nightmare and anything but a game. Because if you die inside the Demi-Monde, you die in the Real World.
Now, in the year 2018, something has gone horribly wrong. . . .
The U.S. President's daughter has been lured into this terrifying shadow world and her only hope of rescue is Ella Thomas, an eighteen-year-old student and jazz singer who's never received a day of military training. Somehow she must infiltrate the Demi-Monde and bring the First Daughter out. But Ella is about to discover something the U.S. government does not yet know—the walls containing the evils of this simulated world are rapidly dissolving . . . and the Real World is in far more danger than anyone could ever imagine.
"Superb?.Such an inventive world is engrossing on its own, but the wildly unpredictable plot and characters make for plenty of surprises and twists."
