The year is 2320, there is a new drug that stops the aging process, and there’s no more disease or air pollution. One thing, however, that the future world shares with this world is that rich kids don’t like poor kids. Chelsan struggles with daily teasing and downright bullying, protected by only a couple schoolmates who have dared befriend her. She protects her secret at all costs until one day her world is turned upside down. Chelsan’s mom is brutally murdered and she soon figures out that she is likely the next target. On the run, Chelsan must figure out who is after her and discover the dark secrets of her past.
The futuristic world in which Chelsan lives is pristine on the surface, with a darkness lurking underneath. Gone are disease and aging. What’s a world, in which people can choose the age they would like to stay forever, like? In this world population control is the key to everything. How can it be done, with no one dying of old age, and presumably being able stay in their reproductive years for an eternity? It’s a question no one in Chelsan’s world seems to ask. As long as everyone gets the wonder drug Age-pro, they are happy to live a life of eternal youth.
Controlling an ever increasing population would seem to be an impossible task, but society chugs along rather nicely in Riser. But Chelsan discovers there are forces at work that are beyond the natural and that she at the center of a deadly conspiracy.
Riser is an exciting adventure, with Chelsan and her friends finding themselves in one perilous situation after another. It also presents some interesting science fiction ideas, particularly in the use of an anti-aging drug. Since people do not die of old age, religion has been all but wiped out. Moral guidelines have been skewed. Teenage children look the same age as their parents.
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