The Extremes

by Christopher Priest

The Publishers Weekly review provided a concise plot summary:

"On the same day, at the same time, that a man with a gun committed mass murder in Kingston City, Texas, another armed man did the same in the seaside resort town of Bulverton, England. FBI agent Teresa Simons, 43, lost her husband in Kingston City. Now she's visiting Bulverton to determine if the slayings were more than coincidence. Teresa's training included the virtual reality scenarios of ExEx (Extreme Experience), which reconstructs violent events and requires participants to get shot over and over until they learn the right way to fight back. The FBI uses ExEx for training; companies market it for entertainment. Teresa uses ExEx facilities in Bulverton to seek parallels between the two murder sprees. But the GunHo Corporation has a major ExEx investment in the Bulverton incident, and wants to thwart Teresa. Could ExEx's feedback loops have altered time and reality, affecting or even creating the paired killings? Teresa's discoveries horrify her, but propel her into action. She endures a barrage of carnage to find her way back to her love." Booklist offered another summary: "FBI special agents Teresa Simon and her husband, Andy, have been trained in ExEx—Extreme Experience—a kind of virtual reality enabling intelligence officers to relive scenes of carnage, murder, and brutality as they learn to save themselves. Andy is investigating the possibility of connecting killers with victims thought to be random, in the hope of becoming able to predict violent outbursts, when, ironically, he is killed by a crazed gunman on a shooting spree. Teresa takes a restorative trip to England, her birthplace, sojourning in Bulverton, a sleepy former resort town. There, she winds up investigating a mass murderer's shootings of her hotel's owners, the barmaid's husband, and many others on the very day of Andy's death. Thanks to a bourbon-induced haze, the line between reality and ExEx blurs for panicky Teresa, and suddenly she is "experiencing" the violence in Bulverton. Or was she dreaming? hallucinating? If not, who is controlling her ExEx experience?"