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Author Charlie Huston has been able to corral his vivid imagination in this fascinating tale of the brave new world. Half of the story involves a robot specialist named Jae, a young woman who has been hired by the leading intelligence consulting firm to track the source of a power grid failure in the United States. Hired to keep her safe is Skinner, so nicknamed for his unusual childhood upbringing.
From the moment Jae agrees to find the source of the terrorist threat, her life is endangered. She doesn't trust the company she's working for, which has placed her in peril before, nor is she sure she can trust Skinner, the asset protection specialist, whose operating maxim has made his reputation a target worth testing by other, competing players.
The trail of the search for those who tried to bring down the US power grid leads Jae and Skinner to Europe, and from there, to the slums of Mumbai, where a most unusual social development is taking place. The second story involves those Mumbai residents and, in particular, one family, which is seeking to change the course of their (and their neighbors') fate.
The story ends brilliantly, which is not something that can be said of many thrillers, which often result in endings that feel more anticlimactic than the reverse. Not so for Huston, who takes the disparate pieces of his thriller and makes the sum even greater than the parts. Before arriving there, however, readers have to hang in to overcome a rocky (or perhaps just confusing) start. It's frequently like watching one of those movies that makes no sense until half way through the film.
If readers are willing to test their fortitude, they will be more than amply rewarded by story's end. Like those confusing movies, once completed, participants will want to go back to the beginning to replay all those sequences that were mere fog earlier. Even without doing so, readers are likely to find that they have taken a most unusual journey and perhaps caught a glimpse of just what promise the future might hold.
§ Christine Zibas is a freelance writer and former director of publications for a Chicago nonprofit.
Reviewed by Christine Zibas, August 2013
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