- Title:
- Brilliance (Brilliance Saga, #1)
- By:
- Marcus Sakey
- Pages:
- 444
- Rating:
- 5
In Wyoming, a little girl reads people’s darkest secrets by the way they fold their arms. In New York, a man sensing patterns in the stock market racks up $300 billion. In Chicago, a woman can go invisible by being where no one is looking. They’re called “brilliants,” and since 1980, one percent of people have been born this way. Nick Cooper is among them; a federal agent, Cooper has gifts rendering him exceptional at hunting terrorists. His latest target may be the most dangerous man alive, a brilliant drenched in blood and intent on provoking civil war. But to catch him, Cooper will have to violate everything he believes in – and betray his own kind.
From Marcus Sakey, “a modern master of suspense” (Chicago Sun-Times) and “one of our best storytellers” (Michael Connelly), comes an adventure that’s at once breakneck thriller and shrewd social commentary; a gripping tale of a world fundamentally different and yet horrifyingly similar to our own, where being born gifted can be a terrible curse.
“But watching the children play—they’d moved to a new game, where a little girl spun once, then closed her eyes and answered detailed questions about everything in the room, down to the number of buttons on Alice’s dress—Cooper saw a whole generation of abnorms growing up right under the noses of the DAR, unreported, untested, untracked. The implications were enormous.”
I found this hard to put down, because the action was so well written. I see book after book, touted as the next James Bond or Jason Bourne. This book just breathes, doesn’t try and impress you by saying how wonderful it’s supposed to be, and comes out the richer for that humility.
A friend pointed out the lack of character development. and, yes, there is a predictability to both the book as a whole and Cooper’s specific plays. But you don’t read this sort of book for detailed psychoanalysis, you read it for a thrill and a dollop of science. Sakey delivers!