The Rapture

Gabrielle Fox has lost her married lover, her unborn child, and the use of her legs in a car accident. Fox is a psychologist who works with severely disturbed children, and in what seems like a far to rapid a return to work she finds herself at Oxsmith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital, home, as she describes it "to a hundred of the most dangerous children in the country." One case she is taking over from a therapist who has been granted a leave of absence (sound alarm bells here) is that of 16-year-old Bethany Krall. Bethany is the daughter of a well-known preacher of the Faith Wave, a movement that is sweeping the world in the face of increasing environmental crises and regional wars. (Jensen's novel takes place in an unspecified near future of accelerated global warming and unrest.)

Gabrielle Fox's specialty is art therapy. Bethany has stabbed her mother forty-five times with a Phillips head screwdriver. She is psychotic, manipulative, brilliant, and possibly prophetic. She can accurately foretell the dates of upcoming earthquakes, fires, and hurricanes. And for October 12, she has foreseen The Tribulation, a cataclysmic world event that will be welcomed by those believers like her father as the long-awaited rapture that will translate the faithful to heaven.

Jensen is writing both a character-driven horror novel and an eco-thriller here, and for the most part she pulls it off. Bethany is a dangerous and scary girl. Gabrielle finds unexpected love with a Scottish physicist who comes to believe in Bethany's predictions. Gabrielle has frightening encounters with people from Bethany's past. But all this serves Jensen's carefully constructed three-act thriller, with a major event or reversal planned at each 100 page mark as she builds to her grand finale. The fate of the world hanging the balance plot may strike readers as discordant and too much the Hollywood blockbuster maneuver for the sophistication Jensen brings to much of the writing, but she proves she can write a page turner.