Spark

Jake Underwood, the contract killer at the center of this futuristic thriller, believes he's dead--he suffers from "Cotard delusion," a rare condition in which the brain refuses to acknowledge its existence. The setup poses a challenge for an audiobook narrator. How do you keep the thrill in a thriller when the main character, the book's narrator, is emotionally flat-lined? Scott Brick succeeds by emphasizing tempo over tone and by occasionally infusing Underwood's resigned persona with a spark of excitement, a maneuver that also helps to make the ending more palatable. Fans of dystopian tales will feel at home in this novel's dark near-future, a bleak, frightening controlled world of corporate surveillance, robotic interactions, and morality-free decision making. R.W.S. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine

August 4, 2014
In his first outing since concluding the Four Realms trilogy, bestseller Twelve Hawks returns to the same dystopian milieu in this engaging but predictable thriller, set in a future landscape of paranoid government control, blanket surveillance, and extreme economic disparities. Jacob Underwood, an assassin, works for an enormous New York City multinational that often needs to eliminate a threat. Underwood’s strength as a hired killer is the emotionless, robotic nature that allows him to operate with logical, ruthless precision. Doctors have long told him, however, that the condition that makes him so effective could gradually wear off. And that’s exactly what happens when he is tasked with killing the fascinatingly offbeat Emily Buchanan, a minor employee who has absconded with financial secrets from her company and is threatening to expose them on a WikiLeaks-type website. Twelve Hawks’s prose, cold and clinical at times, yet punctuated with moments of great sensitivity, matches the tone and mood of his setting perfectly. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House.

February 2, 2015
Twelve Hawks’s new novel, set in a
dystopian near future, is told from the perspective of Jacob Underwood, the survivor of a terrible motorcycle accident that left him spiritually and emotionally dead. Lacking conscience, empathy, and fear, Jacob is the ideal contract killer for a secret department of a multinational organization named DBG that will do anything to smooth out corporate ruffles. Trouble begins when Jacob is ordered to kill the embezzling son-in-law of a brutal Indian power broker, along with the man’s daughter and young grandson. He quickly murders the thief, but can’t bring himself to dispatch the others—especially the child. He becomes even more reticent when he’s sent to find Emily Buchanan, a young DBG employee who’s gone missing with a flash drive containing information harmful to the corporation. He’s to recover the flash drive and kill Emily. When that doesn’t happen, both of them are on the run. Reader Brick uses an appropriately affectless voice for Jacob, but subtly adds just enough emotion to keep the narration engaging. Among his best interpretations are Jacob’s handler, Ms. Holquist, whose Southern accent doesn’t quite disguise her iron purpose; the gruff, sadistic Larkin Tate, another assassin and Jacob’s bête noir; the youthful Emily, who quickly loses her sunny disposition; and her eager and slightly naive boyfriend, Sean. A Doubleday hardcover.