During a recent visit to my local Borders Bookstore, I noticed a new Greg Bear paperback on the rack and stopped to pick it up. The title was DEAD LINES, A Novel of Life...After Death. Hmmm, I thought, something a bit different from Bear. I'd read many a Greg Bear book in the past but I don't remember anything particularly supernatural. So I dropped down my money and took the book home.

Having read this man's work in the past, I knew that I would be in for a decent story. Bear's BLOOD MUSIC remains one of my favorite novels to this day even though I read it nearly two decades ago. But as I began turning the pages of DEAD LINES, I saw that this piece would be a bit different. Bear was treading on new territory here...and, as usual, he was proving to be good at it.

Of course, I'd expected nothing less. But DEAD LINES turned out to be a deeply thought provoking work. It tugged at my emotions, it made me feel strongly about the characters, about what they were experiencing, about what disasters our quest for new technology might some day lead to.

DEAD LINES is a story about a down and out former small budget filmmaker...a man whose work couldn't exactly be called "porn" but was as close to it as you could possibly get. Having achieved some success in the industry several decades ago, and still riding whatever small wave he could from that success, Peter Russell was in need of work and in need of money. For quick income, he often ran small errands for an elderly man of substantial wealth who had taken Peter into his trust. Through this relationship, Peter Russell stumbled on to an opportunity to make some major money that seemed too good to be true.

TRANS was a new wireless communications system that threatened to push cell phone technology into the deep dark abyss that all outdated technology gradually disappears into. The creators of TRANS had tapped into some type of new bandwidth that seemed to be limitless and crystal clear, allowing conversations held between TRANS units to be free of static or interference no matter the distance between users. Peter Russell is asked by the small team that heads TRANS to come up with a new promotional campaign to get the word of this breakthrough technology out to the masses. To start with, Russell picks up a few thousand dollars in advance pay and a bunch of TRANS units to give away to friends and colleagues.

However, it soon turns out that the bandwidth TRANS units tap into is not of this Earth, or I guess I should say, not from this plane of reality. Instead, TRANS was a technology that tapped into the very frequencies inhabited by the dead or those lost souls who still had not found their way on to the next place after life had come to an end. For Peter, whose young daughter had been viciously murdered not too long ago, this staggering aspect of TRANS leads him to a new level of awareness.

DEAD LINES is at times scary, at times suspenseful, at times thought provoking and at times deeply emotional. As Peter comes into contact with the essence of his murdered child and shares the experience with a still living daughter, his entire way of life is altered. As he learns of the dreaded secrets surrounding his elderly benefactor and the man's young wife, his life is changed even more so. As he experiences the deep psychic trauma of still living people, echoes of scenes that have transpired, shadows of the hurt and despair felt by others still breathing and living on this Earth, his entire outlook on life is rewritten. For Peter Russell, the experience of TRANS changes everything...

This book takes the reader on a quick and dirty journey through the hell that life here on Earth can sometimes be, the triumph of the human spirit and the victory of one soul over forces that are often out of our control as we stumble through life here on this planet. DEAD LINES was a treat for me, a departure from the norm for Greg Bear and a vivid confirmation that a great author can dabble in many genres and still be at the top of his game.

Get your hands on this one, folks, and enjoy the ride. Bear knows how to tell a tale and pull at those heartstrings while still delivering a thrill every now and again. DEAD LINES is a gripping ghost story, a tale of the never ending love between parent and child, a diary of one man's journey into the latter part of an empty life and a darn good read overall.