Bounty

May 2, 2016
Byrnes (The Genesis Plague) fuses science fiction and espionage in this smart, near-future dystopic thriller. When a website begins putting lucrative bounties on the heads of global criminals who have evaded justice—including Wall Street power brokers, politicians, and unethical businesspeople—a group of elite U.S. government operatives, led by FBI special agent Roman Novak, seeks to shut down the site. But its creators remain elusive as the body count rises and many people start to embrace the site’s simple credo (“If the law should fail, let justice prevail”). Novak and the government’s most talented cryptanalysts struggle to find a way to access and bring down the site before it irrevocably changes the world. The overall character development is superficial, but the action-packed story line is full of plot twists and explores such topical matters as cyberterrorism and hacktivism. Byrnes raises some serious questions about humankind’s increasing dependence on—and assimilation with—the digital world. Agent: Doug Grad, Doug Grad Literary Agency.

May 15, 2016
Vigilantism goes viral in this thriller about a website that pays bounties for the killing of unpunished child abusers, financial scammers, human rights violators, and other bad actors.These are individuals such as Chase Lombardi, a Bernie Madoff-like investment banker, who days after his acquittal gets shot through the eye by a sniper in the name of "social justice" while gazing out the window of his posh Manhattan office. The price on his head, as he was informed in taunting text and email alerts: $530,000. More than 20 other people have been targeted by bounty4justice.com in the United States, Europe, and Asia. But even the savviest techs can't locate the host servers of the site, especially after it starts dealing in untraceable NcryptoCash. As brutal as the killings are--a bigoted white congressman is torched in his car by his Hispanic limo driver for cancelling insurance benefits, resulting in the death of the driver's asthmatic son--the people behind bounty4justice are hailed as "freedom fighters" a la Edward Snowden. Soon enough, the "proof of death" videos required by the site for payment go viral, a reality show-like fever grips the nation, and ordinary citizens are competing with professional assassins for prize money. Byrnes (The Genesis Plague, 2010, etc.) has a solid, if far-fetched, premise to work with, and he knows his way around secure message boards and such. But he spends so much time cataloging the assorted targets and the workings of the site that he risks wearing the reader out. And the book never delivers the kind of dramatic payoff its "cyber spring" promises. Charles Bronson's Death Watch meets the Internet, with little of the hand-wringing melodrama that might suggest.

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May 1, 2016
This is a grand-scale spin on the vigilante storythe guy knocking off all the bad people the cops can't nail and who earns the cheers of the public and the media. Byrnes' vigilante offers a twist on the theme: he's mastered cyberspace to the point where he can outsource some of his to-do list, offering a cash reward on his website to anyone who will kill the crooked banker, the news anchorman who got away with raping a girl, and the weasel who bilked Medicare for $127 million. And he's just getting started. There's a monster cast of victims, and one of agents out to close this operation downand that's the problem with the novel. It sprawls. Individual scenes are sharply drawn, but the lack of a single point of view makes the chapters blur and many of the characters mostly interchangeable. Still, the premiseusing technology to make the vigilante's job easierhas a certain allure and may draw fans of techno-thrillers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)