I was trying to figure out why I was reading this book for most of the time I was reading it. It's fast-paced, urgently mysterious, and alpha male (not my usual search terms).

As the story drew to a close, I think I figured out how this book came into my orbit. Maybe 5-10y ago, I read a pair of really good books like this, fast-paced, almost Bourne Identity-like, with a mystery and sci-fi elements. The series was John Scalzi's Lock In (I think there were only 2 books, or maybe 2 and a prequel?). This book has similar flavoring: astute, shiny, male detective who is "on the case", mysterious science

in a dystopian society

, and a ticking clock device, in this case, figure it out before the town kills you.

Plot points I took issue with:

if his family was there, why didn't Pope or anyone bait him with that at the jump. Yo Ethan why are you struggling so hard to bail when Teresa and Ben are.....right here? And just Beverly's character in general (a nod to IT?)...she was trying to help him but no one at the bar knew her? Or did they just say they didn't know her? They didn't do a great job of keeping those 2 apart if Beverly was a threat to this utopia. Last thing I can think of, plot wise, only because I was a phlebotomist for almost 20y....when you get surgery in a normal hospital, they don't give you your sedative through a normal venipuncture, it's through your IV so they can also give you pain meds, saline, etc. I guess maybe the justification here I could give them is this wasn't a normal hospital, it was some Podunk half-staffed facility staffed by idiots who were barely online and working with limited equipment (although the reveal tells us the founder was a billionaire who spent "billions on r&d" so I would think they're not starving for supplies or staff).

Some of the phrasing was clunky and took me out of the narrative. One example was "She took out a glass, squirted water all over the ice." Is it just me? What a strange way to describe that, in the actual word selection and the phrasing/grammar. Another example was the writer describing the river noise, how it rushed by with a "purr". Um, what? Other than that, it definitely gave a Thin Blue Line, home of the free because of the brave, Toby Keith, xenophobic vibe and when I reached the end, I wasn't sure if the writer crafted this vibe for this book or if the writer's own traits were peeking through this "fiction". Either way, it put me off the rest of the series, but I think if you also enjoyed the Lock In series, this is another series to check out!

Update - I googled his author bio and fwiw his Wikipedia says he fought his wife for medical rights of their kids to vaccinate them, so he seems more lib than I picked up on in the book.