
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

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.

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.
I turned from the dirty basins to the three desks in the corner. The laminate-coated fiberboard frames of each workstation had only cables protruding from holes in the surface. Phones and computers had been here but yanked out unceremoniously along with the plants when the previous tenants left.
One desk held a few papers. A brochure for pizza and a real estate notepad. Another had a pen. A personal possession! I picked it up.
The room around me flickered and the basins were full of plants again, under hanging fluorescent lights. Slender aluminum tubes reached up over the basin edges like large insect arms. A bell jingled off to my left and a fine mist burst out of the arms in unison.
I walked up to one of the basins full of tiny lush bluish ferns. A small plastic label in the dirt declared RESISTANT STRAND 122B. Farther down the line, I could see a kind of evergreen seedling.
As I got closer to the evergreens, I saw glints of red in the spiky leaves and tiny spindly pods on the branches. Flies buzzed around the plants and I saw one of the pods open like a glistening green mouth. A fly landed inside and the mouth snapped shut. I shuddered as I contemplated the size those little mouths could become if they grew proportionate to the rest of the tree.

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.
When I’m out for coffee with other book-loving moms, I sometimes talk about what it was like to write novels with a baby in the house. The Variant Conspiracy books are the only ones I ever wrote with a baby in tow.
In Irina’s Cards was conceived, outlined, written, and revised during my maternity leave with my first child. He was a decent napper early on and I was able to both work on fiction and take on some freelance copywriting assignments. And when my assignments dried up, I dedicated more naptime to fiction.
I should add that I live in Canada and my maternity leave was exactly one year. I’ve written books much more quickly than that. But what I was really proud of, then and now, was that I got to grips with looking after a baby, and established the work life balance I needed, but wasn’t sure beforehand, that I could pull off.
Fast forward three years and I was on another maternity leave, ready to ratchet up my efforts to find a home for Irina. I finally found her a place with Soul Mate Publishing. But I had to produce the proposed sequels as quickly as possible. I didn’t have a great napper on my hands the second time, but I took on the challenge anyway. I wrote The Compendium and Terra Nova with my daughter strapped to my chest most of the time.
Today, they’re both great readers at 13 and 10 years old. I’d like to think they picked up their love of reading from my writing books by their sides as babies. But it’s probably because their dad read to them every night – and still does even in the middle school years. I hope that when they’re just a bit older, I can start to share some of my books with them.

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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