***Winner of International Thriller Writers's Best Ebook Original Novel award!***
Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Rebecca Cantrell drops you into a vast, dark world: 100 miles of living, breathing, tunnels that is the New York City underground. This subterranean labyrinth inhales three million bustling commuters every day. And every day, it breathes them all out again... except for one.
Software millionaire Joe Tesla is set to ring the bell on Wall Street the morning his company goes public. On what should be the brightest day in his life, he is instead struck with severe agoraphobia. The sudden dread of the outside is so debilitating, he can't leave his hotel at Grand Central Terminal, except to go underground. Bad luck for Joe, because in the tunnels lurk corpses and murderers, an underground Victorian mansion and a mysterious bricked-up 1940s presidential train car. Joe and his service dog, Edison, find themselves pursued by villains and police alike, their only salvation now is to unearth the mystery that started it all, a deadly, contagious madness on the brink of escaping The World Beneath.
Praise for The World Beneath:
“Cantrell's THE WORLD BENEATH simply blew me away: exciting, visceral, inventive, illuminating. The main character, Joe Tesla, is as charming as he is resourceful. He's an agoraphobic trapped within the dark bowels of New York City who must face a threat to the bright world above him. Full of tantalizing true secrets of that subterranean world, matched with a breakneck pacing of a shocking thriller, here is a novel that shines a light on the beauty and horror hidden just out of sight beneath the world's greatest city. So grab a flashlight and get ready an adventure like no other.” – James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Eye of God
“The World Beneath is a unique, non-stop action thriller…Cantrell creates a deadly – yet also cozy – underworld beneath the streets of Manhattan, where trapped hero Joe Tesla and his dog Edison battle evil below our feet for the fate of mankind. The author grabs you on the first page and drags you into the dark depths for a wild subway ride that races to a fatal finish and leaves you breathless and begging for more.” - Kieran Crowley, New York Times bestselling author of HACK, A Shepherd Novel.
THE WORLD BENEATH was listed as #7 on tthe weekly indie bestseller list at Galley Cat on December 26. The novel was also #1 in technothrillers, #5 in mysteries overall, #20 in thrillers overall, and #100 overall in the Amazon Kindle store.
I plan it to be the first in a series, so this book should receive a boost in sales whenever I release later novels in the series.
Subway tunnels breathe. They exhale when trains come and inhale when they leave. Their concrete lungs fill with smoke and soot and rubber and the scents of a hundred ladies’ perfumes. When trains aren’t running, the tunnels hold their breath. They might let wisps of warm air drift into the cold night, draw in slow nips of bracing frost, but mostly they sit still, waiting for trains to bring them back to life.
A thousand times a day their breath coursed over Joe Tesla’s body. It was not so warm as human breath, nor yet so cold as stone. He was used to it, now.
Because he lived here, underground, in the tunnels of New York City.
He had not felt sunlight on his skin for 181 days, and he might never feel it again. His skin, long pale, had whitened. He looked like a vampire, except that he didn’t have the teeth for it.
He didn’t have the teeth for a lot of things these days.
Not so long ago, he’d had plenty of teeth. Sharp ones. Now he wasn’t much use to anyone.
Edison nudged his hand with a cold nose, brown eyes concerned. Edison was his psychiatric service animal—a patient and affectionate dog who’d inherited the best genes of his Labrador mother and golden retriever father. When Joe got upset, the dog brought him back, brought him home. Edison pulled Joe through the darkness. He’d have been lost without him.
He scratched Edison in his favorite spot behind his ear. The dog’s tail thumped the hard train ties. As always, Joe counted, and with each number its corresponding color flashed through his mind: the number one was cyan, two blue, three red, four green, five brown, six orange. Edison stopped wagging his tail, and the colors and sound faded. This late, quiet filled the empty tunnels, broken only by the occasional squeak of a rat, or the rustle of tiny paws across paper blown down from a platform.
| Language | Status |
|---|---|
|
German
|
Already translated.
Translated by Wiebke Gruhle
|
