Take Flight

In Take Flight, Eric Bakker has been reunited with his parents, Gabriel and Clara and his brother Michael, but now the stakes for survival are even higher. In the first two novels in the trilogy, Hit the Ground Running and Flow Like Water, Eric and his classmates, possible future girlfriend Tess and twins with a talent for computers, Lakey and Seth, have been on a wild and dangerous ride.

Eric’s parents and their research team have been located, but their secret study of an ancient immortal race, the People Under the Mountain, has come at a heavy toll. The research lab was firebombed, people are dead and would-be friends are now hunting them for the highly prized secret of eternal life. Previously, they’d rescued Ada from centuries in the Vatican, but before she could be reunited with her husband, John Williams, he is gravely injured. The team is now on a mission to save him, one that takes them to Trondheim in the barren hills of Norway, another enclave of the People.

Tess’ father, Sam Edwards who purportedly died in a plane crash in Russia, has now been found. They discover that Sam is a secret undercover agent and that his disappearance five years earlier was part of his deep cover. Sam is now bringing his skills and connections to the quest to save Williams. Lakey and Seth bring high energy, impressive technology skills, and humour, with their never-ending film reference banter and their insatiable appetite for fast food. But just as the team is getting close to the mountain, Sam realizes they are being followed, and it is Eric who is the target. All fingers point to Eric as the guilty party in the trail of bodies and destruction that has followed him across North America and Europe.

After narrowly dodging the FBI and Interpol, it is the Vidi, a group of undead whose only purpose is to kill the People and all who are associated with them, that find their way to Norway. In a series of tense moments, the last battle is fought, one in which the effectiveness of the secret fluid, dreylagr, which works on the ‘heart’ of the immortals, the avelids, has decayed over time. The People effectively, like a battery, ‘ran out of juice’.

In the last scene, readers witness the truth behind what Avelid are, how they came to earth and how dreygyl, the fluid and the secrets behind the immorality came about and the hint that the mission has not ended.

Author Mark Burley has really ramped up the action and excitement in Take Flight.