Kill Decision

Starred review from May 14, 2012
Perfectly blending nail-biting suspense with accessible science, bestseller Suarez (Daemon) establishes himself as a legitimate heir to Michael Crichton with this gripping present-day thriller. The U.S. military is in an uproar after someone used an unmanned Predator drone to destroy a mosque in Iraq during prayers, killing and wounding thousands. Since the drone bore American markings, the Arab world discounts U.S. declarations of innocence. Advances in technology have allowed such weapons to make “a kill decision without direct human involvement.” Meanwhile, professor Linda McKinney, an ant expert, has managed to tag each member of an ant colony to study the colony’s swarm behavior, but her research in Africa abruptly ends after an attack on her lab. McKinney is rescued by a shadowy figure whose true motives and loyalties are obscure, but who seeks to make use of her findings. Suarez manages to keep the reader genuinely in doubt about which characters will survive, and couples deft plotting with evocative language (e.g., Kinshasa and Brazzaville are “essentially Africa’s liver—circulating the population of the riverine interior through a pitiless Darwinian filter”). Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, Sagalyn Literary.

July 15, 2012
In this Crichton-esque thriller, a female scientist specializing in ant intelligence is drawn into a nightmarish plot involving swarming drones launching terrorist strikes on U.S. soil--on their own, not as programmed by humans. To myrmecologist Linda McKinney's dismay, her findings on the social behavior of the murderously territorial weaver ant--Oecophylla longinoda--have become the basis for the technology behind the drones. She is doing field research in Tanzania when her living quarters are bombed and she is abducted--not by the enemy, but by a secret force headed by a rogue special operations soldier called Odin. Her death is faked to protect her from the faceless terrorists and to use her as bait to draw them out. McKinney enters into a frightening limbo existence in which she doesn't know what is happening, where she is or whom to trust. After escaping Odin's group, or thinking she has, she witnesses horrors that convince her he's on the side of good, and she works with him to expose the threat the drones represent. At a time when the military relies increasingly on drone intelligence and firepower in the war on terrorism, this thriller is eerily unsettling, if not quite plausible. Suarez, who established himself as a cyberthriller go-to author with Daemon (2009) and Freedom (2010), feeds his story with just the right amount of techno know-how, taking care not to overwhelm the human dimensions of the story (even if two cyberravens who fly around spying on people are the book's most interesting characters). Those with uneasy feelings about their trackable cellphones will be even more fearful after reading about the uses to which their easily accessible IMEI numbers can be put. A confident thriller that leaves us wondering not whether its fictional premise will one day become reality, but when.

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February 1, 2012

What happens when the decision to kill in battle can suddenly be shifted from human to machine? America is under attack by drones programmed to seek out and execute targets, and Special Ops soldier Odin is trying to stop the carnage with the help of Linda McKinney, a scientist whose research on ant societies has been preempted by the unknown enemy to run the marauding drones. Techno-thriller author Suarez goes beyond the New York Times best-selling Daemon to get at some big issues.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2012
Someone is using high-tech military drones to make it look like the U.S. is attacking civilians. Odin, a rebellious military investigator, is tasked with finding out who is responsible for the attacks. When it starts looking like the drones are acting autonomously, without a human controller, Odin recruits Linda McKinney, an expert in ants and colony behavior, to help him determine how to stop an enemy that can't be stopped by the usual methods. Although the story invites comparisons to Michael Crichtonespecially to Prey (2002), about an autonomous swarm of nanobotsit should be noted that Suarez isn't quite the same caliber of storyteller. This is a book with some very intriguing ideas and a well-executed plot, but its characters are rather thin. There's a lot of potential, for example, in the mysterious Odin, but he never really steps off the page. Fans of technothrillers, particularly those with a military environment, should be steered in Kill Decision's direction as long as they are not led to expect Crichton-level writing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)