The Hatching by Ezekiel Boone

A billionaire was trekking in the high plains of Peru. His flight home crashes without warning just outside of his Minneapolis home. A nuke explodes in remote China. A package is sent to an American entomologist at American University. 

Dr. Melanie Guyer and her grad students open the package sent by colleagues on a dig deep in Peru. It contains what appears to be a sac. The kind of sac that an insect would grow in. But it's calcified. They set up to begin to study the sac only to find its temperature rise.

In Dehli, India, some minor bureaucrat heads to an underground series of flood control chambers to obtain some routine measurements. On the Pacific trade routes, a super container ship filled to the brim from China is set on autopilot for the Port of Los Angeles. 

The Chinese say the nuke was an accident. An exercise that went south. Our bad. The series of doors in the Delhi tunnels are obstructed from the inside. Knee deep. Insects. All dead. Some the size of a fist. 

But not all are dead. And the ones alive are voracious. And they swarm. Eating any flesh in their path.

Which is not what spiders do.

Dr. Guyer's insect sac hatches and dozens of these spiders rush out, crashing against the glass walls of the insectarium. They are hungry, so Dr. Guyer drops in a lab rat . . . and it's devoured in seconds. By Spiders. Acting more like piranha. 

The doors of the Delhi tunnels are breached and spiders swarm like ants into the street. Flesh is stripped. Bodies stripped right down to the bone. The freighter's crew is dead and the ship is headed straight for the docks at open water speed. The crash spills thousands of containers, some of which have been breeding spiders. The containers came from the same corner of China as where the nukes were detonated.  And that Minneapolis plane crash yields a few spiders, one of which ate its way out of the billionaire's face.

The President essentially closes the borders. Grounds all flights. Imposes martial law in the hardest hit areas. Her Chief of Staff's ex is Dr. Guyer so before long, Dr. Guyer is an important and frequent guest of the Oval Office. 

Let's see. Peter Benchley (with an assist from Spielberg) scared everyone out of the water with Jaws. Hitchcock showed us how terrifying birds can be. Michael Crichton's Congo went overboard on gorillas. (and don't even get me started on Sharknado). Add Boone to the list. He has given everyone more reason to fear spiders. Normally a solitary creature, these spiders act like Army ants and feed like piranhas. And there are millions of 'em. China thought, in vain, a nuke would stop the spread. 

And no one knows how to stop them.

Sleep well tonight. 

East Coast Don

Available July 5, 2016.