THE VARIANT CONSPIRACY TRILOGY
By Christine Hart
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GENRE: SciFi romance
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Series
What if the men destroying our world were doing it on purpose? The Variant Conspiracy trilogy follows 19-year-old Irina Proffer as she connects the dots between her cryptic employer’s work and an international plot to transform Earth. All while she navigates love and grief, both for the first time.
As Irina comes of age within a subculture of human mutation, she and her friends hunt a group of corporate eco-saboteurs. They discover a singular ancient evil that wants nothing more than to wipe out all life and remake our planet. As Irina pieces together visions of the future, she must figure out a way to change an outcome that seems inevitable
Book 1: In Irina’s Cards
Irina Proffer leaves mundane small-town life behind when she experiences visions inspired by a strange deck of tarot cards. To get answers, she travels from her northern British Columbia home to the province’s coastal capital. She quickly discovers a world of fringe genetic science and supernatural mystery.
Working for Innoviro Industries, Irina is drawn in by a powerful first love and compelling, yet dangerous questions about the nature of the company’s business. Meeting other ‘variants’ brings Irina closer and closer to the dark truth about her origins. She finds herself at the heart of two overlapping love triangles as she scrambles to escape her employer’s grip.
Before she leaves the city, Irina realizes she has merely scratched the surface of a frightening conspiracy on a global scale.
Book 2: The Compendium
Irina and her renegade variant friends are scrambling to pick up the trail of their former employer, Ivan, and his globally catastrophic scheme. After strategically sharing their story with the media, the group heads south from Vancouver to Seattle hoping to recruit more experienced – and lethal – variants to their cause.
Their attention develops a laser focus on an engineered disaster mere days ahead of them. Ivan is using what staff and resources remain of Innoviro Industries to set off a violent earthquake in San Francisco. While they fight to stop the earthquake, Irina pushes the love of her life Jonah as far away as she can, trying to keep his unstable genetic degradation in check.
Irina’s friends think they’ve seen the worst that Innoviro could bring forth by the time they reach a secret facility in the Mojave Desert. As they near the property, the group uncovers a horror none of them had ever imagined.
Book 3: Terra Nova
The end of humanity and an unrecognizable future Earth are now days away. After their first glimpse of the Terra Nova virus, Irina and her variant friends know their former employer’s plans are almost at hand. Their failed attempt to publicize Ivan and Innoviro Industries’ horrific activities has left them utterly reliant on their own wits and weapons.
After surviving a catastrophic earthquake in San Francisco and destroying a secret viral testing facility, Irina’s crew has traveled by a variant portal to London. On the other side of the world, they begin tracking when and where Terra Nova will be unleashed on the world. They know stopping Terra Nova is only the beginning of unraveling Ivan’s plans to reinvent the planet, but if they can’t stop this virus, there will be no one left to save.
Excerpt from In Irina’s Cards:
We walked a bit farther in silence. I had assumed Jonah would find something, at least a mention of the drug, within the files at Innoviro. How could something either guarded or fresh out of the lab, be a trustworthy substance I should let them inject into my veins? Even if Ivan showed me charts and research findings, what insight could I gain from them?
Jonah and I rounded a corner. The path diverged around a ring of shrubs and a large arbutus tree. On the one side, the path jutted out to a viewpoint looking over to the Inner Harbour. On the other, a bench sat tucked into a semicircle of overgrown juniper bushes. The sun had nearly dropped behind the hills in Esquimalt, casting vivid yellow-orange light onto downtown. Bright pink clouds floated like cotton candy in the sky. If we kept going the Harbour would greet us in its gown of twinkling lights. My sunroom balcony had that view at every sunset. I turned towards the bench. I suddenly felt like I needed a break.
Jonah sat down next to me. He touched the side of my mouth and I jumped.
“Sorry; you had some ice cream …” he said sheepishly.
I wished I was the kind of girl who carried a mirror in my purse, but I knew better than to bother searching. I looked out at the ocean and the pink pieces of light floating on the water.
“You look tense.”
His arm slipped behind my back as I kept staring ahead. I turned to answer and found myself nose-to-nose with him.
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Author Guest Post
Did you have a minor character who insisted on playing a larger role in the story. If so, please tell us about it. And if not, please tell me how you get the characters in your head to behave.
I had so many characters surprise me while writing The Variant Conspiracy books! Although I have a protagonist and several first-string secondary characters, the world-building of these books called for a huge host of minor characters. I needed a hidden sub-culture of natural and genetically enhanced mutants, all making their ways in the world with varying degrees of success and happiness, depending on the extremity of their traits and abilities.
I think Adelaide caught me off guard the most. We don’t see her until Book 2, The Compendium, but I really liked her. She was smart, beautiful, bold, accomplished, and … selfish. She was a genetic hybrid between a human and a cephalopod, who turned out to be far more insidious than I envisioned. I liked her and I wanted her to redeem herself. I won’t go into spoiler-level detail, but given the circumstances of her day-to-day life, I must concede that she had a tough time too.
A runner-up choice must be Casey, from Book 1, In Irina’s Cards. He’s a gigantic nightclub bouncer who passes for human, albeit a massive, muscular one. It’s not until he starts fighting that scars on his arms open like seams to release a second set of arms. He transitions in moments from looking like a bodybuilder to a multi-limbed humanoid that looks more like an insect than a bouncer. He surprised me in the sense that I had planned to give him more substance, but his personality never really materialized.
For the most part, my characters usually behave themselves. Probably because I keep them on a tight leash. Between my outline-crafting plotter side and my attention-to-detail mom side, my characters stay on the proverbial path. Most of the time.
AUTHOR Bio and Links:
Christine Hart is a writer of speculative fiction for youth and adults. She also runs an online metalsmithing shop, Hart Fabrications.
Christine’s backlist includes YA, NA, and MG titles. Her first collection of adult fiction, Weird Stories of Strange Women, is coming in 2026.
When not writing, she creates wearable art from recycled metals, vintage glass, and unusual gemstones. She shares her eclectic home with her husband and two children.
Learn more about Christine and her work at hart-fabrications.com and christine-hart.ca.
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GIVEAWAY
Christine Hart will be awarding a $20 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner.
