Matthew Vierling

Last Refuge Matthew Vierling

For 100,000 years, mankind has been the supreme predator on the planet, and inside the enormous biosphere called Gaia Two, a killer is stalking and murdering the residents. But according to the laws of natural selection, it's only a matter of time before evolution spawns a predator that will prey upon us. On an isolated Pacific island, that time is now. Mythological dragons have arisen! The legend of Beowulf recounts the tale of a warrior who came to Heorot to save strangers. Beowulf was a forbidding killer welcome only because a voracious dragon was marauding for human prey. For the residents of Gaia Two, Bishop is their slayer of dragons, who insists on aggressively hunting down the dragons. His warnings are ignored however, and like Beowulf he knows the loneliness of the warrior who is merely tolerated during times of peace. Then Bishop is proved prophetic and events begin to go catastrophically wrong on the island. Last Refuge is an exhilarating eco-thriller about an isolated group of unsuspecting scientists fighting to survive the sudden emergence of a lethal predator heralding the planet's next cataclysmic extinction event, and perhaps the end of the human species. Now, we are the prey.