THE CODE BREAKER

In Rothman’s (Lords of Prophecy, 2020, etc.) thriller, the life of a young man with a mysterious past suddenly takes a bewildering turn.

Twenty-year-old Jeremiah Samuelson’s life seems fairly mundane. He’s living in the projects with his mentally disturbed mother and scraping by on public assistance when he gets a job as a telemarketer. Under the surface, Jeremiah is anything but mundane. He has no memory of the first 13 years of his life, and he hides a secret from the rest of the world—he’s a telepath, although he doesn’t exactly revel in it. “You might think that mind-reading is a gift, but it’s actually disgusting,” he confides. “I shudder when I think about the oily sick feeling I get when I hear what’s crawling around inside some people’s heads.” He might be ambivalent about his secret power, but it allows him to set sales records at his new job. The influx of money helps, but his mother’s recent disturbing dreams, which he can see, make him suspect there’s more to his mother than he knows. These suspicions are quickly confirmed by a story she sketches for him about a KGB program to develop a superchild. Soon, Jeremiah’s entire world flips (“If you had asked me yesterday if there were demons in this world,” he says at one point, “I’d have laughed.” In lean, well-controlled chapters, Rothman rapidly expands the story to include a secret chamber deep in the Ukrainian forest, a hidden people called the Pacitum (who see that “evil and good are two sides of the same coin that is mankind”), a celestial being named Lilith, and the revelation of Jeremiah’s own role in all of it. Rothman skillfully mixes elements of wisecracking fiction with Indiana Jones–style mystical artifacts, and he brings the whole novel to a well-turned cliffhanger ending.

A very promising first installment to a new action-fantasy series.