Meg Gardiner: China Lake

By MICHELE HEWITSON

Santa Barbara is a nice place, a "postcard city of acrylic blue skies and red-tile roofs of Mexican-American warmth". In China Lake it's also home to the Remnant, an Apocalypse Any Minute band of fundamentalists whose idea of a good day out is to turn up at the funerals of people who died of Aids with banners saying comforting things such as, "Sex Ed = AIDS = Damnation". Its leader is Peter Wyoming, "an in-bred, low-wattage, mouth-breathing redneck".

Evan Delaney is a lawyer-turned-journalist whose nephew has been abandoned by his weirdo mother, who has since joined the Remnant. What begins as a custody battle becomes something much stranger and involves the cult, the American Armed Forces, top-secret weapons and a new breed of rabid dogs crossed with coyote.

The plot's barking and the characters are cliched but it's deftly turned on the edge of almost believable paranoia attached to cults and those guys who are supposed to be on the side of right.

Hodder & Stoughton

$34.95