On Friday, February 7, 2020 7:00 pm, Eoin Colfer author of Highfire
will visit the University Book Store in the U District location. Ticket are available at brownpapertickets.com. A single ticket admits two people and includes one copy of the book. A ticket costs $19.99 plus service fee.
For almost two decades, Eoin Colfer’s Artemis Fowl series has enchanted young readers across the world. Now, Colfer delivers Highfire, his first high-octane fantasy novel for adults, the story of a vodka-swilling, Flashdance-loving dragon forced out of reclusion to help a teenage troublemaker take on a murderous sheriff intent on taking control of the bayou underworld.
Once mighty – dominating the skies and scorching angry mobs – Vern has come to accept a hermit’s life on Louisiana’s Honey Island Swamp. For centuries he was known and feared as Wyvern, Lord Highfire of the Highfire Eyrie. But in the modern day, Vern hides from tour boats in a fishing shack, reduced to lighting cigarettes with his breath, binging Netflix, and swilling Absolut in a Flashdance T-shirt.
The age of dragons has but one survivor, and this is his life – until the young Everett Squib Moreau hurtles into it. With a permanent record not lacking for the word delinquent, the fifteen-year-old Squib is a local swamp rat who does what he needs to do to survive, hoping his saintly single mother won’t find out. When Squib sees his latest boss, a smuggler, murdered at the hands of crooked local cop Regence Hooke, he flees through the swamp. Hooke corners him in the muck with a grenade launcher in the ensuing chase – when Vern swoops in and flies him to safety. This pits the three of them against each other, careening headlong toward a fiery reckoning that spills from the swamps to the French Quarter, capturing the attention of the Mob, the FBI, and Squib’s mother alike.
Will Regence Hooke’s bloodthirsty play for control of the Bayou underworld push all of dragonkind into extinction, or will Vern rise over the swamp as Lord Highfire once again?