Kill Decision

Dave Thackeray
Jul 24, 2017 · 2 min read

They pitched Suarez as the literary lovechild of Crichton and Clancy. And in many ways, that positioning is accurate.

Suarez is an obnoxiously talented author. And one with a technological repertoire that would shame some of the most accomplished nerd bloggers who steal our time on sites such as TechCrunch and The Verge.

Kill Decision is a sweetly-scribed story of how what we know about nature can be transferred to see off nefarious foes in our technologically-charged times.

Using the habits of a rare breed of ants, an unknown attacker is swarming drones to pick off targets across the US. Dividing and conquering has never been so terrifying.

A special forces operative called Odin takes by surprise myrmecologist (expert in the social structures of ants) Linda McKinney after she’s identified as the unexpected hero of the piece. Only Linda knows enough to launch a full-on assault on the world’s latest mystery nemesis, who controls the fate of millions at arms length.

Daniel’s career was in systems consultancy to major defence, finance and entertainment corporations. Clearly he’d seen enough to know the implications of being reliant at the civilisation level on zeroes and ones.

Which makes what Suarez has to say in his four books all the more apocryphal.

You only have a few weeks to get your teeth into Kill Decision because next month (August 2017) sees the 10th anniversary edition of Daniel Suarez’s Daemon hit bookshelves.

Daemon, as always for Suarez way ahead of its time, sees a chain of events grip America following the death of Sobol, a computer programmer. It turns out that this is Sobol’s gift to the world. And with him off the mortal coil, this murderous mess becomes all the more difficult to untangle.

Book reviews

Mostly business, sometimes fiction, almost always both

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