Hidden River by Adrian McKinty

 

This wasn't all that great a novel, at least it wasn't a very readable one--the voice was mostly disjointed and scattershot (though there were occasional flashes of acidic wit) and the POV character (and his close buds) came across as pretty hapless and flailing for most of it. It did eventually get somewhere worth getting to, mostly. The "big reveal" was one I saw well ahead, which could reflect on McKinty or it could reflect on me, dunno and don't care; at least it was only twenty or maybe fifty pages ahead, not like most of the fricking novel. Things did clear up immensely the last quarter of the novel or so, that's arguably not enough.