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![Hosts: A Repairman Jack Novel (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack Book 5) by [F. Paul Wilson]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51erkgxrJUL._SY346_.jpg)
Hosts: A Repairman Jack Novel (Adversary Cycle/Repairman Jack Book 5) Kindle Edition
F. Paul Wilson (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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From New York Times bestselling author F. Paul Wilson, Repairman Jack is back in the urban adventure thriller, Hosts.
As his fans know, Repairman Jack doesn't deal with electronic appliances; he's a situation fixer, no matter how weird or deadly a situation may be. Repairman Jack has no last name, no Social Security number, and no qualms when it comes to getting the job done--even if it means putting himself in serious danger.
After fifteen years of separation, Jack is contacted by his long-lost sister, Kate, to help her track down the source of her girlfriend Jeanette's sudden trance-like behavior. Referred by a mysterious stranger who gives only Jack's name and phone number, Kate is shocked to find out that the "repairman" she seeks is none other than her little brother--and not altogether happy to find out what little "Jackie" has been doing with himself for all these years.
With Jack leading the way, Kate finds out that Jeannette's behavior can be traced back to the experimental therapy she underwent for a brain tumor: now Jeannette's brain and those of several other subjects are infected by a mutated virus. Like any good virus, it wants to multiply--and if Jack can't stop the virus in its path, there will be deadly results.
Meanwhile, Jack is traveling on the 9 train when suddenly a passenger goes berserk and starts shooting at random--leaving Jack no choice but to throw himself into the spotlight by putting the shooter down. Worse for Jack, one of his fellow passengers is a reporter for the local tabloid, The Light, who sees Jack's heroism as his ticket to journalistic stardom. The reporter promises to make Jack a celebrity hero, a household name--which could mean the end of Repairman Jack as we know him.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherForge Books
- Publication dateApril 1, 2010
- File size679 KB
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Review
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
Kate Iverson stared out the window of the hurtling taxi and wondered where she was. New York was not her town. She knew certain sections, and if it were daytime she might have had some idea as to her location, but here in the dark and fog she could have been anywhere.
She’d started the trip thirty minutes and who-knew-how-many miles ago in the West Twenties with a follow-that-cab scenario—I still can’t believe I really said that—that moved across town and up the FDR Drive. The East River had served as a comforting landmark for a while, but as twilight had faded to night, the river fell behind, replaced by dark shapes and fuzzy lights looming in the fog beyond the roadway.
"What road is this?" she asked the driver.
Through the Plexiglas barrier came the accented reply, double-rolling the r’s: "Bruckner Expressway." The driver’s ID tag showed a dark mustached face with glowering black eyes and indicated he was Mustafah Salaam.
She’d often heard "the Bruckner" mentioned in the incessant traffic reports on New York City radio but had no idea where it was.
"This is Bronx," the driver added, anticipating her next question.
Kate felt a quick stab of fear. The Bronx? Visions of burned-out buildings and rubble-strewn lots swirled through her brain.
Oh, Jeanette, she thought, staring ahead at the cab they were following, where are you going? Where are you taking me?
Kate had stashed her two teenagers with her ex and taken a short leave from her pediatric group practice in Trenton to stay with Jeanette during her recovery from brain tumor therapy. The experimental treatment had been a resounding success. No ill effects…at least none that would be apparent to Jeanette’s treating physician.
But since completion of the treatment, Kate had noticed a definite personality change. The Jeanette Vega she’d come to know and deeply love over these past two years was a warm, giving person, full of enthusiasm for life, with an opinion about everything. A delightfully edgy chatterbox. But slowly she had changed. The new Jeanette was cold and distant, rarely speaking unless spoken to, leaving her apartment without a word about where she was going, disappearing for hours at a time.
At first Kate had chalked it up to an acute reactive depression. Why not? What medical diagnosis can rock the foundations of your world more deeply than an inoperable malignant brain tumor? But depression didn’t quite explain her behavior. When Jeanette should have been depressed—when she’d been told she had a literal death sentence growing in her brain—she’d remained her upbeat self. Now, after a miraculous cure, after regaining her whole future, she’d become another person.
Maybe it was a stress reaction.
Or a side effect of the treatment. As a physician Kate prided herself on keeping current with medical progress, so she was familiar with medicine’s cutting edge; but the experimental protocol that had saved Jeanette seemed damn near science fiction.
Yet it had worked. The tumor was dead, and Jeanette would live on.
But would she live on without Kate?
That, Kate admitted, was what was really disturbing her. Nearing middle age—in darn good shape for forty-four, she knew, but still six years older than Jeanette—she couldn’t help worrying that Jeanette had found someone else. Someone younger.
That would be so unlike the old Jeanette. But this new Jeanette…who could say?
Jeanette had been put on notice that her remaining time on earth was numbered in months instead of decades; she’d believed she’d seen her last Christmas tree, tasted her last Thanksgiving dinner. And then it was all given back to her. How could anyone’s psyche survive that sort of trauma unscathed?
Perhaps the ordeal had caused Jeanette tos reassess her life. Maybe she’d looked around and asked, Is this what I want? And perhaps, in some new back-from-the-brink perspective, she’d decided she wanted something else. More. Different.
At least she could tell me, Kate thought. She owes me that much.
Jeanette hadn’t asked her to leave—she had the right since it was her apartment—but she had moved out of the bedroom they’d always shared on Kate’s visits and into the study where she slept on the couch. No amount of questioning from Kate had elicited a reason why.
The not knowing gnawed at her. So tonight, when Jeanette had walked out the door without a word, Kate had followed.
Never in a million years would she have imagined herself trailing the woman she loved through the night. But things change. It hadn’t been all that long ago that she never would have imagined herself loving another woman.
Up ahead, Jeanette’s cab turned off the Bruckner and Kate’s followed it onto a road the signs identified as the Bronx River Parkway. And after a few miles the city suddenly disappeared and they were in the woods—in the Bronx?
"Stay closer," she told the driver. "You’re letting them get too far ahead."
She didn’t want to come all this way just to lose her.
Then Kate saw signs for the Bronx Zoo and New York Botanical Gardens. More turns, each new road smaller than the last until they were traveling a tree-lined residential street.
"Are we still in the Bronx?" she asked, marveling at all the well-kept homes trailing by on either side.
"Still Bronx, yes," the driver told her.
How come it never looks like this on TV? she wondered.
"Keep going," Kate said when she saw Jeanette’s cab pull into the curb before a neat brick colonial.
Her anxiety soared as a thousand questions cascaded through her mind. Who lived there? Another woman?
She had the driver stop half a block beyond. She watched Jeanette’s cab leave her on the sidewalk and pull away. As Jeanette started up the walk toward the house, Kate opened her own cab’s door.
"Wait here," she said.
"No-no," the driver said. "You must pay."
Nice neighborhood or not, this was still the Bronx, and a long way from Jeanette’s apartment. Kate did not want to be stranded here. She glanced at the meter and fished the exact amount out of her wallet.
"Here," she said, keeping her voice low as she handed him the money. "You’ll get your tip when we get back to the city."
He seemed to accept that, nodding without comment as he took the money.
She pulled her raincoat tightly around her. A chilly night for June. The fog was thinning and the wet street glistened in the glow from the streetlights; every sound seemed amplified. Kate was glad she’d worn sneakers as she padded along the street, keeping the parked cars between her and Jeanette.
When she’d approached as close as she dared, she stopped behind a tree trunk and watched Jeanette walk up the front steps of the house. Kate’s heart ached at the sight of her: a yellow rain slicker and loose jeans hid her feminine curves; a Yankees cap hid much of her straight, jet black hair, but Kate knew those curves, remembered the strawberry scent of the shampoo Jeanette used to wash that hair.
Suddenly Kate wished she hadn’t come. Who was going to open that door? Forty minutes ago she’d been dying to know, now she was terrified. But she couldn’t turn away. Especially not now, because the door was opening and a man stood there, a heavyset fiftyish man with a round face and small eyes and a balding melon head. He smiled and opened his arms and Jeanette embraced him.
Kate’s stomach lurched.
A man? Not Jeanette! Anyone but Jeanette! It simply wasnR
About the Author
F. Paul Wilson is the New York Times bestselling author of horror, adventure, medical thrillers, science fiction, and virtually everything in between. His books include the Repairman Jack novels, including Ground Zero, The Tomb, and Fatal Error; the Adversary cycle, including The Keep; and a young adult series featuring the teenage Jack. Wilson has won the Prometheus Award, the Bram Stoker Award, the Inkpot Award from the San Diego ComiCon, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers of America, among other honors. He lives in Wall, New Jersey.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.Product details
- ASIN : B003J5UHY2
- Publisher : Forge Books; 1st edition (April 1, 2010)
- Publication date : April 1, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 679 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 518 pages
- Lending : Not Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank: #466,189 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #2,940 in Hard-Boiled Mysteries (Kindle Store)
- #3,240 in Occult Horror
- #4,077 in Hard-Boiled Mystery
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

I was born toward the end of the Jurassic Period and raised in New Jersey where I misspent my youth playing with matches, poring over Uncle Scrooge and E.C. comics, reading Lovecraft, Matheson, Bradbury, and Heinlein, listening to Chuck Berry and Alan Freed, and watching Soupy Sales and horror movies. I sold my first story in the Cretaceous Period and have been writing ever since. (Even that dinosaur-killer asteroid couldn't stop me.)
I've written in just about every genre - science fiction, fantasy, horror, young adult, a children's Christmas book (with a monster, of course), medical thrillers, political thrillers, even a religious thriller (long before that DaVinci thing). So far I've got about 55 books and 100 or so short stories under my name in 24 languages.
I guess I'm best known for the Repairman Jack series which ran 23 novels. Jack is out to pasture now, but I may bring him back if the right story comes along.
THE KEEP, THE TOMB, HARBINGERS, BY THE SWORD, and NIGHTWORLD all appeared on the New York Times Bestsellers List. WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS won the first Prometheus Award in 1979; THE TOMB received the Porgie Award from The West Coast Review of Books. My novelette "Aftershock" received the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for short fiction. DYDEETOWN WORLD was on the young adult recommended reading lists of the American Library Association and the New York Public Library, among others (God knows why). I received the prestigious Inkpot Award from San Diego ComiCon and the Pioneer Award from the RT Booklovers Convention. I'm listed in the 50th anniversary edition of Who's Who in America. (That plus $3 will buy you a coffee at Starbuck's.)
My novel THE KEEP was made into a visually striking but otherwise incomprehensible movie (screenplay and direction by Michael Mann) from Paramount in 1983. My original teleplay "Glim-Glim" first aired on Monsters. An adaptation of my short story "Menage a Trois" was part of the pilot for The Hunger series that debuted on Showtime in July 1997.
And then there's the epic saga of the Repairman Jack film. After 20 years in development hell with half a dozen writers and at least a dozen scripts, Beacon Films has decided that "Repairman Jack" might be better suited for TV than theatrical films. (We'll see how that works out.)
I've done a few collaborations too: with Steve Spruill on NIGHTKILL, A NECESSARY END with Sarah Pinborough, THE PROTEUS CURE with Tracy Carbone, and the Nocturnia series with Thomas Moneleone. Back in the 1990s, Matthew J. Costello and I did world design, characters, and story arcs for Sci-Fi Channel's FTL NewsFeed, a daily newscast set 150 years in the future. An FTL NewsFeed was the first program broadcast by the new channel when it launched in September 1992. We took over scripting the Newsfeeds (the equivalent of a 4-1/2 hour movie per year) in 1994 and continued until its cancellation in December 1996.
We did script and design for MATHQUEST WITH ALADDIN (Disney Interactive - 1997) with voices by Robin Williams and Jonathan Winters, and the same for The Interactive DARK HALF for Orion Pictures, based on the Stephen King novel, but this project was orphaned when MGM bought Orion. (It's officially vaporware now.) We did two novels together (MIRAGE and DNA WARS) and even wrote a stageplay, "Syzygy," which opened in St. Augustine, Florida, in March, 2000.
I'm tired of talking about myself, so I'll close by saying that I live and work at the Jersey Shore where I'm usually pounding away on a new novel and haunting eBay for strange clocks and Daddy Warbucks memorabilia. (No, we don't have a cat.)
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Unfortunately the book then starts to go downhill. The main case involves Jack's sister whose female lover has been acting strange since her brain surgery, but is it a natural result of the surgery, or something more sinister?
The problem is that there are so many sideline stories that the main case gets very little page time. The entire sub-plot of the brothers out for revenge is wasted page space. And while the reporter is an interesting character with an interesting arc, alot of pages are again wasted on unimportant information (his rivalry with co-worker, his new GF, etc).
Even with the lackluster plot that tried to do too much, the book could of been good- except for that ending. No spoilers, but it made large portions of the book irrelevant.
O and there is a ton of pro-gun agenda within.
However, Host was a step slower than the previous books, not bad by any means, just not quite up to the high standards previously established.
Hosts feeds off and of a few previous book’s adventures and characters, which I like.
The supporting characters, who are excellent, had a smaller role, too bad.
Overall, I enjoyed reading Hosts and the next installment is in my wish list.
In this novel, Jack gets a phone call from the sister Kate who he hasn't seen since he parted ways with his family after his mother's death. It is an accidental encounter: when she reached out to Repairman Jack, she had no idea it was her estranged brother. She just thought that he could help her get her lover Jeanette back from an apparent cult.
Jeanette has recently recovered from a brain tumor, having been treated with an experimental virus. The virus worked but had an unusual side effect: it has linked Jeanette with others who were similarly treated into a kind of hive intelligence called the Unity. It's bad enough that Jeanette is seemingly emotionless, but her little group has the intent of spreading the virus and essentially forcing everyone into the Unity.
Kate is one of the first targets, and Jack, after trying to help, is second on the list. In certain ways, it is Invasion of the Body Snatchers, though the conclusion is reminiscent of another classic novel/movie which I will not name lest I spoil things (those who've seen it or read it will easily recognize it). In a subplot, Jack's attempts to keep hidden from the government are threatened after he performs a heroic act; this threat to his freedom needs to be dealt with, but is rather irrelevant if he can't save the world too. (There is a rather nightmarish chapter that shows what would happen if the Unity succeeds.)
Although Hosts works as a standalone story, there are references to other books that makes it better if you've read the other books. In particular, there is the larger story of Jack's run-ins with the Adversary (first seen way back in the non-Jack novel, The Keep). Whether this is your first F. Paul Wilson novel or not, however, this novel is a fast and fun read that should be enjoyed by most supernatural thriller fans.
The story of Hosts has potential but never quite lives up to it. Jack's sister is surprisingly bland and the infected lack the physical power to threaten Jack or the cunning to artfully trap him. I also found it odd that the infected didn't go out of their way to start infecting at least a handful of additional people. Instead, they put all their efforts into a plan that will lead to mass infections in the near future. While that plan is good, they know they are in danger and to ensure survival of the virus they should have taken short-term measures as well. Not doing so made it radically easier for them to be destroyed and they really should have anticipated that risk.
By far the worst part of the book is the heavy-handed moralizing about Kate and her lover. It turns out that Kate is a lesbian and the author wants to make absolutely sure that everyone who reads this book understands that it's okay to be gay. There are a couple of chapters that read like a bad after school special as the preaching goes on and on to make sure that readers don't miss the point. I didn't find the concept offensive, just ham-handed in it presentation and completely forced in a way that detracted from the story of the novel. If Mr. Wilson wants to engage in social commentary, I would suggest he learn how to weave it into the story in an entertaining way instead of just browbeating his audience.
This book was a disappointment to me. The best Repairman Jack novels such as The Haunted Air : Repairman Jack (Repairman Jack) (Repairman Jack) are truly outstanding but this one is far less entertaining. I would not recommend this book to newcomers and suggest that fans read any of the others before this one.
Top reviews from other countries

In this book you find out about Jack's sister. This book has an end of the world due to illness feel to it, but there's more to it than that.



