Special FBI agent and uncelebrated medium Marie Parks is now on the hunt of serial killer nicknamed Daddy. Her undercover operation in Daddy's lair goes very wrong, though, and before dying the killer reveals he was the murderer of Marie's parents many years ago. Upon her return to United States, however, a much worse truth waits: Daddy was her biological father. Years of bad memories explode on Marie and cause the appearance of an evil Split Personality.
At the same time, during a dangerous mission in the desert of Mexico, archaeologist Gordon Walls finds himself involved with a mysterious, 150,000 years-old cult, the Guardians of Rivers, of which his grandfather Chester turns out to be a member. After learning he has inherited supernatural powers to protect nature, Walls will be forced to team up with Marie in an effort to protect humanity from the shadowy council named the Foundation.
Contains examples of:
- Abusive Parents:
- The Kransky family, composed by an abusive father, a drunkard (and abusive) mother, and a child predator uncle.
- Kassam's parents abused him because they believed he was an evil child (essentially, because he was the only of his many siblings who had a good health and didn't die).
- Ambiguously Evil: Although Kassam claims his disorder impeded him from feeling anything after experimentally killing his best friend, he sheds tears afterwards and feels an inner agony he later dismisses. This implies it's not that he cannot feel love and morality, but rather that he cannot comprehend them, which given his upbringing and Abusive Parents makes a wholly new sense.
- Ambiguous Situation: Cayley has an Identical Stranger in Grant, having even the same personality. Aside from the vaguely implied Hand Wave that it's because they are both Guardians, it's never explained why they are identical to each other, as the other Guardians aren't. If they were twin brothers, it strikes as odd that this was never even mentioned.
- Artistic License – History: The Masai tribe is said to be threatened from ancient times by an enemy tribe named Kimba. This seems to be either a typo or a stand-in for the real life Himba tribe.
- Artistic License – Medicine: Kassam suffers of an antirely fictional disorder named "Red Fish Syndrome" that makes him almost completely unable to feel anything, both physically and psychologically.
- Artistic License – Religion: Kassam has a Muslim surname, but his philosophical beliefs and his references to Shiva imply he is a Hindu, and if he is meant to be a Hindu convert who was born Muslim, it's never mentioned.
- As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Indian Burgh Kassam has an Anglo-Saxon first name (this was probably inspired on Eric de Burgh, Chief of Staff in the old British India) and a Muslim surname (not impossible for a Dalit, but a bit unusual). His childhood friend Kyssa, on the other hand, seems to sport a variation of the African name Kisa. None of two has a credible Indian name.
- Badass Normal: Mike Brannigan, the Foundation's security chief, does pretty well to fight Kassam's rebellion solely through good management and smart measures.
- Big Bad: Burgh Kassam, chief scientist of the Foundation, although he is seemingly possessed by a bigger, more mystical "Enemy".
- Bittersweet Ending: Humanity is saved from extinction, and from out perspective all is going wonderfully, as psychics are being born and in less of four centuries we will be a spacefaring civilization. However, this will likely bring new problems in the style of Kassam, and we still don't know what happened to the entity possessing him.
- Connected All Along: It turns out Crossman is Marie's biological uncle.
- Continuity Nod: The case of the murdered nuns from The Gospel of Evil is mentioned in Marie's dreams. The rest of the continuity, however, falters.
- Continuity Snarl: The Gospel of Evil and The Apocalypse according to Marie are confirmed to be same continuity by the aforementioned nod, but their respective stories are very difficult to reconcile in a single timeline. The first book established that the world is secretly ruled by Novus Ordo, a cabal of Satanist millonaires aided by supernatural spirits that serve Satan, which is an ancient entity imprisoned on Earth that caused disasters every time it got free. In this book, however, there's an ancient order of superhuman guardians that predate civilization, who are also opposed by their own devastating supernatural entity seemingly unrelated to Satan, as well as another cabal of millonaires unrelated to Novus Ordo. Why those factions never encountered each other in the history of the world is just as odd as it is unexplained, especially given that their respective powers and fields of action would have ensured that they sensed their respective presences.
- Contrived Coincidence: Marie, who is sought after by the Reverend Mothers, lives next to a Guardian.
- Dark and Troubled Past: Marie Parks saw her parents killed at fifteen and later her husband Mark and daughter Rebecca died in a car accident that scrambled Marie's brain and turned her into a medium. But this is just the tip of her iceberg.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Ash, The Dragon, ponders he dispises racists after he finds one. However, he says nothing about homophobic people (the guy he found was both racist and homophobic), which implies he is fine with that.
- The Ghost: The Enemy appears solely in one flashback, and seemingly inside another vessel.
- Magic Pants: Cyan, Kano and Elikan suffer a kind of psychic attack that disaggregate the molecules of their bodies, although they soon recover their physical forms. The odd thing is that they are described as leaving behind only their coats, with no other piece of clothing mentioned.
- Minor Major Character: Kassam has an experience in the desert of Atacama, where an old man passes to him a sort of energy, spirit or whatever that makes him even more evil and gives him the wish to exterminate humanity. It's implied this was the great Enemy mentioned by the Reverend Mothers and the Guardians, but if so, this is its sole appearance in all the book, flashbacks included.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Marie claims to the psychiatrist that she has a perverse fondness for cancer. This is probably a bluff meant to evoke a reaction from Daddy.
- Pet the Dog: Kassam threatens Ash to subject him to You Have Failed Me if he fails to catch Marie and company, a threat he has already carried on in other mooks. However, even although Ash does fail in his mission, Kassam noticeably doesn't carry on this time and instead retains Ash in his side without ill feelings until the end.
- Popcultural Osmosis Failure: Marie seems to be under the impression that Hermione Granger is Harry Potter's love interest, which means that she's either a Harmony shipper or not that familiar with the saga.
- Psychic Powers:
- Marie has the ability to feel the memories and sensation of murder victims, as well as sense the aura of killers. She also seems to have a minor, limited form of Telepathy, which she uses in the prologue to send a help call to all mediums in Rio de Janeiro.
- Guardians and Mothers have Telepathy (with a variety of related tricks), a minor prescience, the ability to damage things through heat and pressure, and the ability disintegrate and reintegrate living bodies.
- Really 700 Years Old: Reverend Mothers can live until 400 years old, moment in which they must pass their memories to a successor and die.
- Remember the New Guy?: Aside from Bannerman, Marie now has a Intergenerational Friendship with a crazy white trash neighbor named Cayley, none of which was mentioned in the previous book.
- Shout-Out:
- The book features an arcane order of all-female Reverend Mothers with psychic powers, some of which allow them to upload their memories on their successors while others serve to control other minds, who intervene in human history from the shadows for the greater good. A drug that makes one prescient and capable to curve space is also mentioned, and a space-faring scattering is promised for humanity at the end of the book. The inspirations from Dune are all but subtle.
- Stephen King's Firestarter is also echoed through all the book. Like Marie, it features psychic powers that cause brain hemorrhages if overused, a little girl with power over heat and whose "parents" are also gifted, bad guys working for the government (under a "The + random word" name) who use a psychic Psycho Serum (the Protocol 6 in particular seems to be a direct reference to Firestarter's Lot 6), a chase through the country with the grandfather of the main characters being involved, and a non-white antagonist with spiritual obssessions.
- Steve Alten's Domain trilogy gets in too, as the story features a space-themed Human Subspecies with superhuman powers whose eyes are distinctively blue, with the Big Bad being a former abuse victim with an instrumentalized form of their powers who is possessed by humanity's Great Enemy and has millonaire resources to his fingertips. Both stories share a heroic organization named the Guardian(s), the description of the future spaceport from Marie is also similar to the facility holding the Balam ship, the Nazca lines are mentioned to be also related to the plot, and even Gordon's character resembles Mick in both personality and background. Alten and Graham have also in common the usage of Present Tense Narrative.
- As in Scanners, the psychic powers showcased in the story can cause bloody physical damage to the point of head exploding even when being strictly telepathic, and are tapped into through special drugs. Also, as in the ending of the film, characters switch bodies through telepathy.
- The Foundation's facility in Puzzle Palace is a giant reference to the Hive from Resident Evil (2002), down to the morally ambiguous super-computer with a female voice that seals the facility when the villain frees a toxic agent that turns people into ravenous cannibals.
- One of the special forces soldiers that raid Puzzle Palace is surnamed Shepard, probably a nod to Half-Life: Opposing Force and its many tributes in video game history.
- Marie references Harry Potter by comparing herself and Gordon to Harry and Hermione respectively. The Lord of the Rings, Flash Gordon and Spider-Man are also namedropped.
- Trauma Conga Line: Marie, already an orphan by the age of 15, had her husband and daughter killed in a car accident that left her psychically Blessed with Suck. But there's more: Marie's parents weren't her first foster family, but the second, with the first being abusive. And there's even more: both families were murder by a serial killer that held little Marie hostage for months. No, not enough: said serial killer, Anthony Gardener, is her biological father. Still not enough: learning all of this has caused Marie, already mentally disturbed, to develop an antisocial Split Personality.
