Skinner

Starred review from May 6, 2013
Skinner, the hero of this exceptionally smart thriller from Huston (Sleepless), gets his name from having been raised for the first 12 years of his life inside a Skinner box—a chamber devised by 20th-century psychologist B.F. Skinner to conduct behavioral psychology experiments on animals. A former CIA agent whose early isolation has made him particularly suited to the trade of killing, Skinner is now a highly paid security technician who specializes in guarding clients, known as “assets.” One such asset is Jae, a genius analyst who likes to spend her time wandering an unnamed desert taking drugs and building tiny robots. The mysterious Terrence, who used to run the security firm Kestrel Dynamics, has worked up a solo operation for Skinner and Jae, which eventually leads them to a momentous discovery in the streets of Dharavi, a slum in the city of Bombay. Stunningly original characters, wildly surprising twists, and an ending that’s both unexpected and moving make this an extraordinary genre stand-alone. This is the sort of book you want to reread just to see how the trick was done. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House.

May 1, 2013
A cyberterrorist attack against America looms in this grim, hard-edged thriller from Edgar Award-nominated author Huston. The scenario at the core of this latest from Huston is time-honored: A plot is afoot that may bring down the U.S. But Huston brings his end-of-the-world cliffhanger solidly into the 21st century by centering it on cyberterrorism. It seems that culprits lurking in the Ukraine are plotting to disable the U.S. computer grid. Missile launching systems have also been sighted in the vicinity, and already they've possibly done a test run that blacked out parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania and took five lives. An independent security agency contends that only a woman named Jae can ferret out what's afoot. She's their "asset," and they'll put her in motion only with an "asset protector." Enter Skinner, whose maxim is, "The only way to secure an asset is to ensure that the cost of acquiring it is greater [than] its value." The two are off to Europe in a pursuit suffused with treachery, violence and double cross. While much of what follows is essentially drawn from the le Carre playbook, Huston kicks it up a step with characters whose hearts of concrete make Smiley and Company look like sob sisters. Skinner's demented parents kept him in a box for the first 12 years of his life, breeding a killer. Jae is a crack roboticist who is often high on amphetamines and psychedelics. Realizing Skinner may be falling for her, she bolts herself in a bathroom stall and screams obscenities. Meanwhile, in contrast, intervening chapters are suffused with warmth (and some of Huston's better writing) as they follow a young Mumbai boy and his family, whose activities eventually intersect with Jae and Skinner's as the doomsday clock ticks away. Huston indeed evokes a bleak, apocalyptic world, but the book is slowly paced and weighted down by a prolix, elliptical style. A tale that may enthrall technogeeks while sending their elders scrambling through Hacking for Dummies.

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Starred review from May 1, 2013
This tour de force features two of the most interesting characters we've seen in years. Skinner, a savant-like killer who struggles to interpret emotions and to speak with normal affect, spent his formative years as part of a bizarre experimentan origin story that unfolds piece by broken piece, each one with fascinating complications. His job is to protect Jae, a damaged, emotionally fragile robotics expert and data analyst with an amazing capacity to sift meaning from massive streams of information. She's supposed to find the source of an attack on the U.S. power grid. But the motives of the people who've hired them are maddeningly elusive, and, as the job leads them through Europe toward an unlikely plot in a Mumbai slum, they have to wonder whether they're pawns in one of the most circuitous bait-and-switches of all time. Huston's world, where powerful private security firms battle each other for access to the new markets created by global chaos, is cynical, chilling, and eminently believable. The plot itself may be a bit of a stretch, but this is mind-bendingly original, from the characters, to the dialogue, to the sensory-overloaded world that feels eerily like the one we're about to live in. Add Huston (Sleepless, 2010) to the A-list.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)