"Evolved"

Chicoan Jesse Lawson works in Information Systems at Butte College; a U.S. Marine, he's served as an intelligence analyst. He's a singer-songwriter; host of the "Coping with Creativity" podcast; and the author of "Evolved" (self-published for Amazon Kindle; visit lawsonry.com for details), a sci-fi thriller that begins quietly at Chico State University.

That's where Dr. Lexa Rogers, a lecturer in archaeology, is on the cusp of getting a full-time position when, out of the blue, government agents from the Department of Homeland Security whisk her away, supposedly for a weekend, on a super-secret mission.

At Chico Municipal Airport the agents drive right up into the belly of a cargo plane for the long flight to San Felice Circeo, home of one of the most important Neanderthal fossil finds. Lexa is a former Marine but the secrecy makes no sense. "The real question now," she tells the agents, "is why some hundred-thousand-year-old bones in Italy are a matter of national security."

It turns out that buried in one of the ancient skulls is a tooth; removed for study, the handlers had accidentally chipped it, as Lexa sees in a photograph. But there's a second picture of the tooth without a chip. Okay. Except that the second picture was taken afterthe first. The tooth has healed itself. The genetic value to humanity? Incalculable.

There's more. Lexa meets Donna Morrow, project director in the Carson Habitat, "three hundred feet below the surface of the Tyrrhenian Sea and fifteen miles south of the Italian coast," where the focus is on Olive, a giant octopus who has learned rudimentary sign language. 

More importantly, cephalopods like Olive can quickly adapt their skin color to their surroundings, rendering them almost invisible. If that ability could be duplicated in the laboratory, soldiers would hold tremendous advantage against enemy troops.

Who wouldn't want such a genetic technology? So there are plots and counterplots afoot--and a grisly attack by a mysterious creature that makes getting at the truth a matter of life or death, even as the horror mounts.

This is the first book in the Special Projects and Intelligence Division Emergency Response (SPIDER) series and readers will eagerly await Lexa's next page-turning adventure.