ASIN: B00IA7N7C8
ISBN-13: 978-1477823941
Publisher: Penguin Group
Line: Berkley
Release Date: June 17, 2014
Pages: 392
Digital Retail: 4.99
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Genre: Mystery
Rating:
The brilliants changed everything.
Since 1980, 1% of the world has been born with gifts we’d only dreamed of. The ability to sense a person’s most intimate secrets, or predict the stock market, or move virtually unseen. For thirty years the world has struggled with a growing divide between the exceptional...and the rest of us.
Now a terrorist network led by brilliants has crippled three cities. Supermarket shelves stand empty. 911 calls go unanswered. Fanatics are burning people alive.
Nick Cooper has always fought to make the world better for his children. As both a brilliant and an advisor to the president of the United States, he’s against everything the terrorists represent. But as America slides toward a devastating civil war, Cooper is forced to play a game he dares not lose—because his opponents have their own vision of a better world.
And to reach it, they’re willing to burn this one down.
From Marcus Sakey, “the master of the mindful page turner” (Gillian Flynn) and “one of our best storytellers” (Michael Connelly), Book Two of the Brilliance Saga is a relentless thrill ride that will change the way you look at your world—and the people around you.
Review
A Better World is the second installment in Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance Saga – a series that tells the tale of a world where, since 1980, 1% of the population has been born gifted. Some of these “brilliants” possess the ability to predict patterns in the stock market, others are able to move unseen through a crowd or tell when a person is lying. Some use their gifts for good, others use them to break laws or game the system. All seem to terrify a certain segment of the population – a group of people growing increasingly nervous about the sort of threat these “abnorms” pose to “normals” like themselves.
Enter Sakey’s series protagonist, a brilliant named Nick Cooper. Once a government agent tasked with hunting down abnorms on the wrong side of the law, Cooper now serves as an advisor to the President regarding brilliant/normal relations. Thanks to a string of vicious attacks by an abnom terrorist organization known as the Children of Darwin, tensions are at an all-time high, and fear and paranoia are spreading like a cancer. Can Cooper help the President reunite the country, or is the United States of America doomed to fight another civil war?
If you’re a thriller fan – strike that, a fan of good books – and you’ve yet to read the first two entrants in Marcus Sakey’s Brilliance Saga, then you’re in for a treat. I flat-out adored the series debut, Brilliance, devouring all 450+ pages in a single sitting, and I’m happy to report that book two, A Better World, is every bit as gripping and compulsively readable as its predecessor.
In A Better World, Markus Sakey’s created a doomsday scenario far more realistic and terrifying than anything I’ve seen come out of Hollywood – one fueled by fear, that pits neighbor against neighbor and government against citizenry. It’s the story of a nation on the brink, where it’s impossible to tell the good guys from the bad, and where the stakes start out impossibly high and yet still somehow manage to rise with every passing scene.
The book’s pace is breathless and the narrative is beautifully structured, never lingering too long on one person, place, or problem. The plot is clever – a perfect blend of sci-fi and crime fic. Sakey’s prose is a pleasure to read – graceful and intelligent with just a hint of snark. His descriptions are vivid, his characters are fully fleshed, and his worldbuilding is both efficient and effective. And if the final pages don’t leave you terrified, heartsick, and wanting more, there’s a pretty good chance you’re dead inside.
If you’re looking for a casual read – something you can pick up and set down at will and that’ll help you drift off to sleep at night, then this book probably isn’t for you. But if you’re looking for the literary equivalent of crack – a book that’ll consume your every waking moment, that’ll cause you to ignore your dog and neglect your spouse and will very likely turn you into a doomsday hoarder, then you should look no further than Markus Sakey’s A Better World.
Buy this book. Read it now. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Reviewed by Kat