This hit the spot. Sometimes you just need a book you can zoom through. Short chapters, intriguing and freaky plot, simple prose, high stakes. Blake Crouch always delivers. I think I like this book less than Dark Matter but more than Recursion. It helped that for once there were zero nuclear bombs present.
This takes place in the near future, when genetic research and technology has been banned almost completely, excepting a few highly regulated government sponsored programs, due to a disaster caused by genetic editing that caused a worldwide famine and killed two billion people. The disaster was caused by our main character’s mother. Once he got out of prison (for helping her create the situation that led to the famine) he was recruited to help track down and stop rogue geneticists, like an FBI for genetic regulation. The plot kicks off when an ice bomb explodes near him and it quickly becomes apparent that someone has targeted him for a genetic upgrade, but who and why?
My only complaint with this one is that I’m tired of fictional portrayals of geniuses involving those geniuses not also having empathy and compassion. This very neatly skirts that dilemma in that people who are upgraded have the ability to hide their emotions away but they still exist, and the main character is extremely emotional, but this was close enough to past portrayals I’ve seen that it irked me at points throughout reading, even though it is very much addressed by the book by the end. (This is not really related to the book, but the best take on this idea I’ve seen is from Brandon Sanderson in his Stormlight Archive books: SPOILERS with the character of Taravangian who is given days where he wakes up at a different intelligence level; some days he wakes up a genius with almost preternatural abilities, and other days he is in a fog and isn’t very bright, and so on all along the intelligence spectrum daily. But the gift comes with a corresponding payment, or curse, which is that he can never possess equal amounts of intelligence or compassion at the same time. He must always be either smart or kind. I like to think this is Sanderson’s way of poking fun at all the portrayals of awful geniuses END SPOILERS.
Another thing about this is that I really liked the ending, and I kind of want to see what happens to the world after our main character’s actions in this book.