It begins in Toronto, in the years after the smart drug revolution. Any high school student with a chemjet and internet connection can download recipes and print drugs, or invent them. A seventeen-year-old street girl finds God through a new brain-altering drug called Numinous, used as a sacrament by a new Church that preys on the underclass. But she is arrested and put into detention, and without the drug, commits suicide.

Lyda Rose, another patient in that detention facility, has a dark secret: she was one of the original scientists who developed the drug. With the help of an ex-government agent and an imaginary, drug-induced doctor, Lyda sets out to find the other three survivors of the five who made the Numinous in a quest to set things right.

A mind-bending and violent chase across Canada and the US, Daryl Gregory's Afterparty is a last chance to save civilization, or die trying.

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, April 2014: Lyda Rose and her colleagues had the best intentions: to create a drug that would cure schizophrenia. Instead, she's in a mental hospital, saddled with a permanent hallucination of a doctor with angel's wings. When a newly admitted teenaged girl commits suicide rather than deal with withdrawal, Lyda recognizes the symptoms and realizes that her drug has hit the streets. She arranges her own release, helps her lover (a paranoid ex-government agent) break out of the hospital, and tries to find out where the drug is coming from. Combining elements of near-future science fiction, cyber-thriller, and whodunit mystery, Daryl Gregory takes us on a pulse-racing, brain-bending adventure that reads like the enthusiastic retelling of a crazy acid trip--twisted and imaginative and frightening and funny and intense. Along the way we investigate drug-pushing churches, we double-cross a gang run by ruthless old ladies, we team up with Native American smugglers, we dodge a split-personality urban rancher, and perhaps most dangerous of all, we try to track down Lyda's old scientific team in search of answers. --Robin A. Rothman

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