Going Zero

Award-winning screenwriter (as in The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Two Popes) Anthony McCarten's novel grabs onto current technology issues to create an engaging thriller. In a potentially unholy alliance, the software company run by the erratic genius Cy Baxter has offered to sell the U.S. government--for a tidy $90 billion-- a surveillance software, Fusion, that can find anyone anywhere in the world. As a beta test, 10 civilians are chosen to become contestants in a cat and mouse game where they must remain at large without capture for 30 days in order to win the $3 million prize. Once the contest begins, they will have 2 hours to disappear. When contestant Zero 10, librarian Kaitlyn Day, is caught on a ATM camera on the first day, Baxter is annoyed that she didn't provide a greater challenge. But the capture team fails to find her and after 3 weeks, she is the only one of the 10 who has not been found. But Kaitlyn, we later learn, has an agenda that has nothing to do with money. She wants  Fusion to find her husband who went missing, supposedly in Iran, over three years ago. In exchange, she won't tell the government any of Fusion's less laudatory plans for for the partnership. The plot is full of surprises and contextualizes the action within current concerns about privacy, surveillance, and artificial intelligence. 

Kirkus praises "This is a curious type of thriller, with sparse violence and no outright villains. The excitement is in the chase, which builds steadily. Is Zero 10 going to screw up their proof-of-concept software? The complications build, and the reader had better pay attention....This well-written yarn proves that you don't have to have a blood bath to have an engaging thriller." Publishers Weekly calls it "... an edgy, compulsively readable thriller."