Spanning a four-day hostage situation in the not-too-distant future, The Blue Light Project looks on as a city unravels and three lives intersect in unlikely ways.

When an armed man seizes a television studio in the center of town, Thom Pegg, a former investigative journalist turned tabloid reporter, is as surprised as anyone to learn that he is the only person to whom the hostage taker will speak, bringing him inside the studio and in contact with the frightening truth.

From outside, meanwhile, the drama of the enthralled and horrified city is revealed through the eyes of two very different people thrown together by the crisis. Eve is an Olympic gold medalist and local hero. Rabbit is a renegade street artist who has just completed a massive and mysterious installation on the tops of hundreds of buildings throughout the city.

As events churn to chaos, Taylor paints a powerful picture of the sinister side of our interconnected world, taking us on a dizzying journey through black sites, 24/7 media cycles, cults of celebrity, gang stalking, underground art, societal paranoia, and dangerous cynicism. The result is a gripping work of dark brilliance, from which Taylor ultimately surprises us with grounds for hope.

Timothy Taylor is the author of Stanley Park (Counterpoint 2003), which was a finalist for the Giller Prize, and the short story collection Silent Cruise (Counterpoint 2002), for which he won the Journey Prize. He lives in Vancouver.

They escaped by the rear doors of the television studio. Mad crowds, crazed. They slammed into each other . . . they grabbed each other and held, or pushed away. The only law governing their movement was the impulse to escape. To get out, get free. In that they were inspired by one another. Pushing and pulling and helping and not helping. The concrete stairs echoed on the way down . . . Some people were on their cell phones already, but there really wasn’t anything to say. They didn’t know anything, nobody did. So close were the performance and the feared reality, so close the entertainment and the violence.

So they yelled into their phones: a man with a gun! But they also added other things . . . As if he had been choreographed! Just like it were part of The Show! . . .

So it was that happy delirium and pyrotechnic bedlam coexisted for awhile as the soldiers ran up and down the aisles . . . and waved their assault rifles in the air. They looked quite real, these men and their weapons, as real as in the movies. Which was exactly how everybody knew that they were actors hired by the studio to carry out The Kill. People understood it, instinctively, Girard included. That they were all still safe within the envelope of programming. It was only when the seventh man took the stage . . . ambling rather calmly across the boards and seeming to observe the action from a critical distance, that the first trace of unfamiliar scent began to taint the air.