White Horse by Alex Adams

"…a brilliant debut with a promising future."

A new literary voice brimming with light and hope.

Zoe came home to find her apartment had been violated. Nothing was taken. A sealed jar that looks ancient and valuable was left behind. Senses alert, paranoia in full control, Zoe looks for help, for someone to tell her what to do. Nick Rose is the therapist she chooses and nothing will be the same again as, one by one, everyone she knows and cares about dies, leaving her to find hope among the shards of her life.

Zoe is a reluctant Pandora unwilling to pick apart the sealing wax and thus begins the first in a trilogy Alex Adams has concocted with White Horse.

In spite of Zoe’s hope for a better life, working as a janitor in a pharmaceutical company in order to fund an education, she is afraid of living. Adams has created a reluctant heroine who walks into danger for the sake of love, for the sake of anger at being left behind, for the sake of hope she doesn't really believe in. Tension tightens the noose slowly as Adams reveals the moments of the past threaded through the fear and hatred of the present. Everything drops away as though Zoe is a would-be prophet braving the desert as she is cleansed, hardened, and fitted for an uncertain future.

Adams's prose is full of emotional potsherds, sharp as razors, and seductive, leading the reader from moments that seem to have no significance through fire and blood as the reader follows Zoe deeper into an uncertain future. This is Alex Adams's first novel, the first installment in a trilogy that demonstrates the essence of what it means to be human. White Horse is a brilliant debut with a promising future. I look forward to the next installment.

Reviewer: J. M. Cornwell