PROCLIVITY MISTAKEN PATH

In Marson’s debut novel with SF elements, a girl attempts to foil the evil plots of the criminals who raised her.

Katie grows up in New York City, the child of British tech entrepreneurs James and Rebecca, who’ve grown immensely wealthy developing disruptive technologies related to cloning and robotics. Unfortunately for the 5-year-old protagonist, she’s forced to spend most of her time in the company of physically abusive nanny Sherry Shames, who burns her with cigarettes and injects her with sedatives to keep her subdued. When Rebecca realizes what’s going on, she fires Sherry, but soon afterward, the family becomes a target. Rebecca is driven off the road while on vacation and severely injured; the family’s house is robbed; and James’ company is hacked. Things continue to escalate, and soon Katie is kidnapped by Sherry and her accomplice—the professor Manico Tronic. Sherry and her husband, Gabe, raise Katie as their own, later passing her off as their murdered daughter. Manico slowly brainwashes an army of college students with drugs and alcohol to do his bidding. Believing her own parents are dead, Katie resigns herself to her new life, participating passively in the criminal enterprises that Sherry and Gabe run using her parents’ stolen technology—she feels as if she’s in “a constant, turbulent storm living with Gabe and Sherry. She was owned by this family.” When Katie is eventually recruited by the Federal Investigation Agency right out of college, however, she has an opportunity to get back at the people who ruined her life. As Manico launches terror attacks against governments and corporations, Katie may be the only one equipped to bring him to justice. But is it already too late to save the world from Manico’s plan to bend all of society to his will?

Marson displays a great deal of imagination over the course of this novel, particularly when it comes to the various technologies at play, such as a project of James’, introduced early on, which effectively allows users to “reprogram” other people’s minds. Unfortunately, the book’s ideas are overshadowed by the rough quality of the writing. The prose is littered with awkward syntax and clunky sentence structure: “Katie woke up sweating from the night terrors and flashbacks of Sherry and what transpired took a toll on Katie physiologically as much as she consciously buried the horrifying thoughts of Sherry haunting her.” This lack of clarity is likely to keep many  readers from feeling engaged with the story. There are relatively few memorable scenes, with much of the story told as expository summary, giving the novel a discursive shapelessness. The characters are thinly drawn, and it’s difficult to make out their motivations. Marson also litters the plot with gratuitous violence and abuse, particularly toward Katie, but makes no real attempt to explore its emotional effects. There are plenty of ideas here that could have been further explored, and the book would have benefited from a much stronger edit to bring them to the fore.

An underdeveloped and unpolished thriller.