The Fold by Peter Clines

 

This is a thriller novel at its heart, though it does have a strong whiff of SF about it--more even than most technothrillers, which this really mostly isn't. The science here is whack enough that I'm inclined to call this more like SF-flavored Fantasy, but I'm not sure trying to nail genre down so hard is particularly helpful. The main character is a weird genius with a functionally eidetic memory; he's arguably a freak, but Clines does a pretty decent job of humanizing him. The writing here is solid, the prose sparkles and shines and has some nifty and amusing turns of phrase; the pacing of the story is pretty taut and the the characters all feel remarkably plausible (even the freakish main). It's a bit jarring to jump to a new POV for the first time somewhere in the last fifth of the novel, that's a choice I'm not sure I like, but I guess Clines needed to show some things he couldn't any other way, it doesn't break the flow of the novel too badly. There's a biggish reveal about two-thirds of the way through that's pretty well-foreshadowed, but no stupid twists. Second good novel I've read from Clines, I'm not interested in his series for my own reasons, but I'll see if I can't find more of his standalones. (This ends as though he was thinking about writing more with some of the characters, but I don't think he ever did.)