Unthinkable by Brad Parks

 

Read this this evening after dinner. It's a deeply implausible novel--at least, it has a deeply implausible premise at its core--but Parks has put in a lot of effort to make it plausible, at least on the surface, and he's kinda succeeded. I mean, I'm really not going to buy precognition as a real thing, but the novel makes it clear how dangerous it would be, even if one were trying to be maximally altruistic (and "maximally altruistic" is itself deeply problematic). I'm not sure it'd be possible even for someone so gifted to so easily evade the public eye, but conspiracies have been a big part of thrillers since at least Ludlum, so that's in-genre and not really grounds for snark. The POV characters here are pretty believable, as they get yanked around by the antagonistic conspiracy (or agents thereof) and as they start to get their own back. There were some reveals I saw coming well before they arrived, but I'm also not going to snark on that--they were reasonable directions for things to go, and they were at least reasonably well foreshadowed, Parks was playing reasonably fair, here. The prose and dialogue have more than a little charm, though I wouldn't call them exactly scintillating. After some flailing around in the first half or so, this turned out to be a pretty worthwhile book.