BOOKS
Eternal Sonata: A Thriller of the New Future
In 2025, murder is a small price to pay in the quest for immortality.
It’s hardly news when a renowned octogenarian scientist dying of cancer disappears from a local hospice, but when Kansas City Star reporter Rich Azadian begins to dig, he discovers that other elderly scientists around the world have also vanished recently—all terminally ill and receiving the same experimental treatment from a global health company. His investigation leads him to the reclusive Noam Heller, a brilliant researcher exploring new technologies to reverse-age cancer and other cells. Using revolutionary stem cell treatments and snippets of DNA from rare, immortal Arctic jellyfish, his breakthrough promises the genetic equivalent of the fountain of youth.
But when Heller is murdered and his lab is destroyed, Rich and his girlfriend Antonia become targets themselves. With the local police and federal authorities failing to see the big picture, he realizes he must take matters into his own hands to survive and stop the killing. His only hope is to mobilize his network of brilliant misfits and infiltrate the vast and lethal race—among cutthroat corporations, national intelligence services, rogue scientists, and a mysterious international organization—to control the new technologies and perhaps the secret of life itself.
Publication date: October 4, 2016
Interviews and Reviews
NPR Leonard Lopate Show, October 5, 2016
Praise for Eternal Sonata
“Eternal Sonata is a brilliant exploration of the many challenges and opportunities our species will face as the exponential growth of real-world technology moves us toward immortality.”
— Ray Kurzweil, Inventor, Futurist, and author of The Singularity Is Near
“Eternal Sonata is a meditation on being human in an age when technology promises to change everything. It will pique your curiosity in science you never thought possible, and make your heart race with the twists and turns of a thriller. A fascinating, joyous read.”
— Debora Spar, President of Barnard College and New York Times bestselling author of Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection
“Jamie Metzl has written a wonderful novel that imagines a future where real world scientific breakthroughs promise massive extension of the human lifetime and the quest for immortality becomes deadly. Filled with brilliant insights on science, philosophy, politics, and human relations, it is a nail-biting thriller with a driving plot that will grip you from the very first page.”
— Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, Harvard Law School, and bestselling author of 31 books
“Taut, tense, and relentlessly exciting with a spine-chilling plot spanning the globe … Eternal Sonata establishes Metzl as the first great thriller writer of the genetics age.”
— August Cole, co-author of Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War
“Eternal Sonata is an exhilarating, must-read thriller, set at the combustive intersection of technology and geopolitics. Like all great science fiction, its paints a disturbing future from entirely plausible facts.”
— Fred Kempe, New York Times best-selling author of Berlin 1961 and President, Atlantic Council