PRODIGY

Futuristic flourishes deck out a down-and-dirty story of a murderous conspiracy that roils an elite boarding school and its brainwashed students.

The year is 2036. Gyromobiles have largely replaced automobiles. They cruise the skies above San Angeles, a city created to handle California’s population explosion. In the desert, a massive tower thrusts skyward. This is Stansbury School, home to 4,000 students (known as specimens), ages 6 through 18, most destined for Ivy League schools. They exist on an elaborate med cycle that stimulates intellectual and physical growth while suppressing sexual and aggressive urges. A lethally armed security force controls “unbalanced” specimens. Foremost among these is Cooley, a rebellious orphan on scholarship who won’t take his pills. His adversary is another scholarship orphan, Goldsmith, unpopular valedictorian and steely enforcer of the rules who yearns for friends. Might a crisis cause the two to bond? Yes indeed. Five Stansbury graduates, unbalanced ex-specimens, have been brutally murdered in San Angeles. Cooley stumbles onto the scene of the sixth serial killing and is set up as the perpetrator, but then his nemesis Goldsmith uncharacteristically breaks the rules and visits the San Angeles murder scene. He realizes he and Cooley are both pawns, and eventually discovers the killings are linked to an imminent Senate vote in Washington that would bestow a trillion dollars annually on Stansbury. The novel spins out of control as murder reaches the school’s executive suites. In comic-book heroics involving laser syringes and heat-seeking ThermaGuns, the orphans hold off Security long enough to allow a former valedictorian, despite her “deep, red, and wet” wounds, to simulcast damning testimony to the Senate committee.

A first novel that sacrifices a serious consideration of eugenics and the price of progress to the greedy demands of a tangled plot.