by M Hickmon

4.5 stars – 86 reviews

Lending: Enabled

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THE HEART-POUNDING, RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES THRILLER HONORED WITH A STARRED REVIEW IN PUBLISHERS WEEKLY’S ANNUAL BEST BOOKS SPECIAL ISSUE
“Hickmon unleashes a shocking blitzkrieg of murder, conspiracy, and child abuse in this disturbing, breathlessly plotted murder mystery…. Eschewing easy answers for moral complexity, this thriller is unsettling entertainment that offers catharsis.” — Publishers Weekly
Amazon Top 10 Best Seller in Vigilante Justice Thrillers
Detective William Hursel has worked countless murder cases, staring down the cruelest deeds humanity has to offer. But nothing prepares him for what he’ll uncover while pursuing 14-year-old Christopher Pesner, a suspect in the brutal rage-killing of his own mother. While news reports focus on Chris’s odd obsession with the violent, blasphemous heavy metal band, Rehoboam, Hursel suspects a deeper motive — a hunch that is confirmed when Chris’s second victim is discovered. Racing to piece together the identity of Chris’s next target, Hursel unearths a shocking link between an embattled politician, a controversial celebrity and a shadowy underworld where human traffickers ply the wealthy with unseemly indulgences.

by Charles Wachter

5.0 stars – 6 reviews

Lending: Enabled

Here’s the set-up:

With ten years passing for every three minutes on a remote stretch of Texas coast, planes fall out of the sky, evolved species are on the hunt, and people die inside one of the most vicious ecosystems ever grown–all a result of the government’s efforts to slow down time.

A lot can happen in ten years. That’s the point. Governments are always racing for supremacy, for scientific breakthroughs, for technological advantages–and these things take time.

Until something goes wrong.

With the grounded yet massive world building of READY PLAYER ONE, thrilling scientific questions of JURASSIC PARK, and the time-bending teen drama of BEFORE I FALL, Wachter’s THE TWIN PARADOX is a brilliantly plotted tale that is both intimate and massive, relentless yet deliberate, and explores the themes of self-acceptance, self- confidence, and natural selection in a richly hued and unforgettable world. Ultimately the eternal question of Nature versus Nurture is boiled down into this fast-paced thriller told over the course of five days and culminates in one single question:

Do we get to choose who we are?

by Betta Ferrendelli

4.4 stars – 122 reviews

Lending: Enabled

Here’s the set-up:

A baby is murdered on New Year’s Eve 1999, her tiny body abandoned in a Dumpster.
Twelve years later, while locked in a vicious legal battle to regain custody of her own daughter, reporter Samantha Church stumbles across the infant girl’s headstone at Golden Cemetery.
Sam is immediately intrigued by the plea for help from the Grandview Police Department on the child’s gravestone. Sam approaches Grandview police detective James Page, the original officer in charge of the case, but without new evidence, there is nothing Page can do to reopen the cold case and bring the killer to justice.
Or is there?
As Sam digs deeper into the baby’s murder, powerful businessmen, a former Merchant Marine and even a strange and mysterious psychic illuminate her path. Though the further she goes and the more dangerous and deceiving her journey becomes, she refuses to give up and let this infant girl’s murder go unsolved.
Cold Case No. 99-5219, is the newest fast-paced novel in the award-winning mystery series featuring reporter Samantha Church and the rest of the great ensemble cast of characters who will keep you coming back for more.

by Susan Kaye Quinn

4.2 stars – 58 reviews

Here’s the set-up:

Restorative Human Medical Care Unit 7435, sentience level fifty, is happiness level five out of ten to serve and heal the human master it loves. But Unit 7435 finds there is a price to be paid for love… and for failing in its primary mission.

Restore  is a standalone short story that takes place in the world of the Singularity novels.

Start the novel series with The Legacy Human (Singularity 1).

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
The future is… unsettling.

Technology isn’t just racing forward, it’s accelerating. This isn’t just our imagination, it’s a natural consequence of innovation building upon innovation. The gap between what we can imagine and reality shrinks every day. Our relationship with technology is already one of the defining issues of the 21st century. As we integrate it ever-more-intimately into our lives and bodies and brains—as we mold our creations in our own image, not only physically, but mentally and emotionally—our tech will shape us in ways we will barely understand.

The 21st century will challenge us to remember what it means to be only human.

But creating a truly sentient Artificial Intelligence is far more complicated than first dreamed in Asimov’s Bicentennial Man. As we learn more about the three pounds of meat and electricity between our ears, as well as consciousness itself, we are realizing how difficult the job is. In a sense, creating an AI will force us to answer some of the deepest questions humanity has ever asked… about ourselves and our place in the universe.

What does it mean to create intelligence if you intentionally limit it? Is it cruel or compassionate to keep your tech from evolving above a certain sentience level?

I hope Restore will provoke a bit of thought in your own personal set of three pounds of meat and electricity.

by Kelsey Browning, Nancy Naigle

4.4 stars – 1,614 reviews

Lending: Enabled

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