Book Club Selection: The Passage

I am entertaining a house guest and am trying to focus on The Passage, a dystopian fiction by Justin Cronin.  Very mysterious so far.  I just found out this is the first of a trilogy. Several characters, many settings. I am at page 68 and about to see how all these characters are connected.

The first characters I met were Amy and her mother Jeanette.  Amy's Dad was Jeanette's abusive boyfriend.  She and her daughter Amy met on hard times to the point that Jeanette found it necessary to turn to prostitution. Then the story took me to emails from Dr. Jonas Lear to a Paul Kiernan in Cambridge.  Dr. Jonas was writing from the jungles of Bolivia.  There were no emails from Paul for us readers to read but it was clear that there was communication from him to Dr. Jonas.

By page 23, Dr Jonas emailed that his team was attacked by bats and some had died.  By page 26, I was meeting Anthony Lloyd Carter death-row inmate number 999642. He did not seem to have a vivid memory of the murder he committed.  By page 29, I was meeting Special Agent Brad Wolgast who was in Texas to meet with Carter and get him to agree to sign his life over to "Project Noah".  He was to get the agreement without actually telling Carter that Project Noah was a scientific experiment.  Wolgast's side-kick is Phil Doyle.
 
The story goes back to Amy who was abandoned by her mother, Jeanette, at a nunnery.  Sister Lacey took Amy under her wings. On page 68, Wolgast and Doyle were on their way to pick up Amy for Project Noah. 

I look forward to reading more of the story.