Amazonia - Tapa dura

From James Rollins, national bestselling author of Subterranean, Excavation, and Deep Fathom, comes a breathtaking masterwork of extraordinary adventure -- a gripping journey into a wilderness of astonishing mysteries as deadly as they are unfathomable.

Out of the world's most inhospitable rainforest, a man stumbles into a small missionary village. Within hours, the CIA operative and former special forces soldier -- tongueless, scarred, his eyes wide with terror -- is dead. But the most disturbing aspect of Agent Gerald Clark's death has his superiors in Washington baffled. Agent Clark had only one arm when he first came to the Amazon -- the result of a well-placed sniper's bullet -- but the photograph of him submitted by a Brazilian morgue shows a corpse with two upper limbs fully intact.

Nathan Rand has made the Amazon region his home since his father led a scientific mission into the lush green wilderness and never returned -- the same doomed expedition that took Gerald Clark into the jungle. Now the government wants Nate to follow the elder Rand's trail, accompanied by a team of scientists and a phalanx of experienced U.S. Rangers. For somewhere in the dark, impenetrable depths of the most dangerous region on Earth there are mysteries that must be solved, no matter what the cost in money, materials... or lives.

There are undreamed-of perils here in this breathtaking world where devouring insects rule, diseases unknown to modern science flourish, and rivers teem with hungry, flesh-eating predators. As Nate Rand and his party push deeper into the jungle, toward places no human has ever entered, they are haunted by an ugly truth that cannot be dismissed and, perhaps, will not be survived: They are not alone... and they are being stalked.

But the threat of mortal hunters pales before the nightmare that awaits fourteen unsuspecting men and women, as each step brings them closer to an ancient, unspoken terror that even the native peoples fear. And as madness, terror, and horrific death descend upon the second cursed Rand expedition, those still living are forced to confront a power beyond human imagining -- one that can forever alter the world beyond the dark, lethal confines of the Amazon rainforest for better... and for worse.