Alma Katsu is the author of six novels, including Red Widow, The Deep, and The Hunger. Before publishing her first novel, Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies. It’s 1944 in The Fervor: A Novel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and as World War II rages on, the threat has come to the homefront. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko’s husband’s enlistment as an Air Force pilot in the Pacific months prior, she and Aiko were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. It didn’t matter that Aiko was American born: They were Japanese and therefore considered a threat by the American government. Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp as a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. Meiko and Aiko team up with a newspaper reporter and widowed missionary to investigate – something sinister is afoot. Inspired by the Japanese “yokai” and the “jorogumo” spider demon, Fervor explores the horrors of the supernatural beyond just the threat of the occult.