Departure 37 by Scott Carson

 

Scott Carson is Michael Koryta's pen name, when he writes something that leans more into Weirdness than his more-usual thrillers (he makes no secret of this) and Koryta can really write, and he seems to understand how to paste kinda implausible premises onto his high-intensity fiction--sometimes this looks like horror, which this book really is not. The instigating event, here is ... kinda plausible, if you squint a little, but this is a time-travel novel--though it seems to be forward, one-way-only, which is the least implausible form, I think. It actually plays pretty close to some of the technothrillers I've read (though that's not a genre I reach for much these days) though Koryta manages to avoid the trap so many of them that I read fall into, of getting into fields I know anything about and then getting everything wrong; it's possible he gets stuff wrong, but I didn't see anything that kicked me out of the novel or anything. There are some weird facts in the novel that are true, and the US government's reaction/s in the novel to thing events it depicts seems ... likely. The most-effective plot threads in it are the more-personal ones, which makes some sense; the characters are all plausible; the prose and dialogue are solid and occasionally lively. Really good.