Scorpion by Christian Cantrell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fairly interesting techno-thriller filled with echoes of Minority Report, Alias, and a long line of other modern spycraft/cop dramas.

I expect that a lot of people will enjoy it for what it is: tech and geek driven; game-friendly, cryptocurrency-friendly, and, when we get to it, the joys of one of the oldest SF tropes which I won't mention here because it's spoilery and late-game in the novel.

That being said, it was fun for the ride even if it never absolutely blew me away.

Little things did get on my nerves, for example, such as a desk-jockey getting into the field with relatively little supervision, but that didn't bother me so much because the entire genre seems to be rife with it. Regardless, it did seem to be on par, with more empahasis on all our modern obsessions. :)

Definitely worth the read.

🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷/5
Scorpion by Christian Cantrell

A CIA analyst gets in on over her head when tasked to find the most prolific and mysterious murderer ever chased. But who is doing the hunting and who is the hunted?

Really smart techno thriller with a time travel wrinkle that still has heart. So many great twists and scientifically interesting plot points! It’s hard not to spoil the novel so I’ll just give you this: you’ll never see the hits, and they just keep coming.

Thank you to Netgalley and Penguin Random House for the widget and the chance to review this awesome book. These opinions are my own.

The Scorpion has a lot going on. I've never read this author before so I was not prepared for the level of detail written in to everything, especially all things technical. Still it was an intriguing story with a lot of moving parts. I was pulled in immediately by the idea of a killer who doesn't seem to have any rhyme nor reason to whom he kills or how he kills. Just a series of 4 numbers left on each body.

The characters were not as well developed as they could have been and I kept thinking that if I could get as much about most of the characters, with the exception of Quinn, as I do everything else this book would have been almost perfect. Even Quinn seemed underdeveloped. I thought this is what a Jonathan Maberry book would be without the personalities. And those are my favorite parts! If this is a book one then I can definitely read a book two, though.

This was a highly entertaining book. The story literally flies by, the writing and character development was spot on. The CIA is pursuing a serial killer, not just any serial killer though, one that has been given the moniker Elite Assassin due to his penchant for travelling to and from kill sites in first class and staying in five star hotels. Quinn Mitchell is a CIA agent assigned to track the Elite Assassin down, and she does a very good job of it, an expert at reading seemingly random data, she's able to track him but is always one step behind. Henrietta Yi is also a CIA agent who work closely with Quinn's boss on the Elite Assassin file and another one that may include time travel, though not humans travelling through time, objects, clues mostly about people who are in the future terrorists. The body count gets high and some of the details of the murders are a tad on the graphic side and include (in one instance) a toddler. It took a bit for me to get used to some of the high tech terminology, but I got past that in the first few chapters. Overall a story very well told, I would high recommend. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Quinn Mitchell is an intelligence analyst for the CIA, and her life is thrown into a tailspin when her daughter dies. Investigating bizarre murders with numeric codes tattooed, burned, or carved into bodies should draw her attention from her grief. Following the killer's lead, she suspects a link between her and the murders, as well as the Epoch Index, a code found within the Large Hadron Collider that even the CIA can't decrypt. Discovering the true meaning of the Epoch Index will shatter everything Quinn has ever known.

This is a fascinating novel, a near-future science fiction novel. There are self-driving cars, augmented reality glasses, wireless charging for prosthetic limbs, new cryptocurrencies, international assassinations, and devices that may or may not be messages sent from the future. Quinn grabbed me from the start, the lonely analyst still grieving her daughter and the decay of her marriage in the wake of that death. The deaths brought her in to analyze the connections and patterns of the Elite Assassin, and she soon sees that it's more dangerous than she thought.

I loved a number of side characters, who were fascinating to read about. Even the characters passing through get a thorough background, and ties between storylines. I enjoyed getting a look into their backgrounds, seeing the connections they made. My favorite ones easily were the victim in our opener and Henrietta. I mean, the image of a brilliant Henrietta looking like a K-pop princess with a Hello Kitty suitcase and holding a Pokémon plush is wonderful, and my eyes widened in surprise as her transformations took place. Others that I felt suspicious of in the beginning really show their true colors after a while, so I can't blame her for changing so much.

I lost track of time reading this, completely immersed in the story. It's a book that also leaves quite a few questions about its future, and is extremely satisfying.

If physics are your bag, this unusual novel about blockchain communications from the future delivered by the Large Hadron Collider directly to a young scientist who was charged with decrypting it will tickle your fancy--or your fantasy
It begins with an intelligence agency seeking the Elite Assassin, as they've dubbed the shadowy figure who's systematically murdering a disparate number of people, including a nine month old infant. The job of identifying him falls to Quinn Mitchell, a brilliant analyst who's already begun to piece the puzzle together .
The plot is complex, the science arcane, and the characters take third place to those elements . If that doesn't matter, this is for you

I enjoyed this book and it was very well written. I don't really read a lot from this genre but it was a fast, gripping read. It left me at the edge of my seat wondering what will happen next in the book. Thank you for Netgalley and Random House Publishing Group for the DRC but all thoughts are my own.

Last night I finished a book that I really hope will have a sequel! Scorpion is a sci-fi thriller set in the near future. It starts as a familiar story about a CIA analyst chasing a serial killer, but then with a twist the novel takes an unpredictable turn. The second part of the book is high-paced and full of surprises. Much entertaining!
I can see why Christian Cantrell’s fiction has been optioned for film or tv. This book keeps your attention and delivers the unforeseen.
Thanks Netgalley for an advanced copy. The book will be released on May 25, 2021.

This was a pretty fast, suspenseful read with some quite unexpected twists. I knew it took place in the "near future" but I didn't expect it to go quite as sci-fi as it did. Unfortunately, I think this ultimately makes it so the story doesn't quite hang together as well as it should - I find a slight disconnect between the first half that reads as a more basic thriller and the second half that brings in the sci-fi elements. I did like where it ended up though. 3.5 stars overall.

I was given advance copy of this book via Netgalley and Penguin Random House.

This was an...interesting read. I am a fan of weird sci-fi and time travel shenanigans, and in that respect, I did enjoy the book. But a lot felt...stilted and odd. I couldn't connect with the protagonist Quinn Mitchell at all, on any level. As an AFAB person who has no desire for children, her driving force in life being "being a mother" felt foreign to me.

The first two-thirds of this book were a mildly interesting, if pretty cliche near-future crime thriller. The last third veered off the rails. Characterizations became increasingly less coherent. Resolving plot threads felt rushed and unexplained. I felt like I fell into a fever dream at some point, and not in the way I enjoy.

I did enjoy the diversity throughout the book, and felt like that helped the world feel more rich and interesting.

Overall, I feel like this book wanted to do a lot, but ultimately fell short.

Welcome to an exceptionally well-written, tightly woven, fast-plotted, edge-of-your-seat, intellectual sci-fi techno, near-future thriller!

Better still, Cantrell crafts three main characters, each at odd with the others, but each of whom you ultimately finding yourself cheering on in their quests to make the world a better place.

Quinn Mitchell, a keenly smart CIA mega-data analyst, gets dragged from her cubicle cubbyhole and computer plasma data screens into the field on the hunt for a rampant international killer. Quinn brings along for the ride a tremendous amount of emotional baggage, as she’s recently lost her young daughter Molly in a drowning in the next-door neighbor’s pool, dealt with the fracturing of her marriage after Molly’s death, and distanced herself from her junkie brother’s and remote mother’s lives. Alone, sad, and with all her family mementos stashed in a storage unit, Quinn struggles to finding any meaning or hope in her day-to-life, and so instead throws herself into the intellectualism of finding complex patterns in reams of Big Data. One pattern she’s tasked with is analyzing any patterns behind an international killer stalking seemingly unconnected victims.

Ranveer, the international killer on the hunt and nick-named the Elite Assassin, travels at the highest levels of luxury from private jets to hotel penthouses, with discrete concierge service taking care of all the details. As he moves from one international city to the next, he’s killing one person in each city, with victims moving from oldest to youngest (the last being a 9-month-old baby) and with four-letter codes burnt or marked on each of their bodies. He’s also killing anyone with insider knowledge of what he’s up to, including uber-wealthy denizens of off-shore Oman man-made islands which they buy and retreat to as their own tiny nations. But things may not be even close to what they seem.

Henrietta Yi, a brilliant double PhD in physics, has left academia to join the CIA to bring her vast scientific prowess to work for world good. Henrietta, a loner, saves her affection for Pokeman stuffed animals and Hello Kitty merchandise to soothe her grief over losing both her parents in a nuclear explosion in Seoul. She’s now at work on an ultra-top-secret CIA project involving a large particle collider that generates a coded message that appears to have been sent from the future.

The lives of these three characters collide with the same energy as particle physics, as messages sent from the future get decoded, time travel appears feasible, and they embrace differing missions to salvage a future they want to ensure. Blend into all of this a potent mix of cutting-edge physics, technological innovation, social politics, and anti-authoritarianism, and you end up with a non-put-downable smart futuristic thriller.

Not often, you find an author who’s carefully crafted language and story sets off a tuning fork in your brain, deeply resonating with all you hope for in a book. That’s what happened for me reading this thriller.

My most fervent hope: a sequel as soon as possible!!

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for sharing this ARC. This is definitely great for fans of books like Blake Crouch’s Recursion. For me, not so much. I found the time travel and science much too dense to really understand. Fast plotting though, centered on a CIA agent chasing an assassin, up until about the 1/2 way point, but after that I mainly felt confused and kept reading in the hope I would eventually be able to understand better, but it didn’t happen.

This is a thriller, and thus the plot moves along pretty quickly. This is by an experience author so I guess my expectations were higher. I enjoyed this, and it is good, not great. I'm not smart enough to know it was not great for me. But I think a lot of thriller fans will enjoy this nonetheless.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of Scorpion.

I've never read any of this author's books before and the premise sounded thrilling so I was excited when my request was approved.

The premise is intriguing; a skillful data analyst, Quinn, is tasked with locating an assassin who is targeting victims that are not associated with one another. At the same time, a brilliant scientist, Henrietta, is on the verge of a scientific breakthrough that will affect her, Quinn and the assassin's lives in ways she could not have imagined. Or did she already?

I love mysteries and thrillers but Scorpion is a techno thriller.

It's filled with sci-fi jargon, metaphysics, complicated jargon and language of a futuristic world. It makes up 95% of the narrative.

Character development is decent but poor for Quinn. She's still grieving the loss of her only child in a tragic accident and the end of her marriage.

She's dedicated and good at her job, but there were certain traits about her that was stereotypically cliche and offensive.

There was a scene where she's trying to glean information about the assassin from a suspect and when she fails in her interrogation, Quinn cries. Seriously. A middle-aged woman crying in front of a potential informant.

She's been working in the CIA for years and she hasn't grown a thick skin? She has no idea how to really look for the assassin and the informant needs to give her guidance. Seriously?

That leads me to another issue I had with Quinn being tasked to track the assassin.

She's given no guidance or direction from her superior. She uses all the tech at her disposal and processes gajillions of meta data to locate this elusive individual but no one instructs her on what to look for.

She has to flounder and fumble and bumble her way through the process; she's a office bee, not a field agent.

She doesn't ask anyone for help nor is anyone asked to assist her? I found this very hard to believe.

The twist in how Quinn and the assassin are connected is a small part of the narrative and one I guessed early on in the story.

The rest of the narrative about the fancy schmancy gadgets the world is connected to, what the feds use to track everyone and everything, science mumbo jumbo, multiverse mumbo jumbo, cryptocurrency, the clever ways an elite assassin dispatches his victims, the high life he enjoys, the hopscotching across the world he and Quinn partake in chasing one another or vice versa.

I find time travel and the multiverse fascinating and if Scorpion has just focused on that, I would have been more interested in the story.

Scorpion was heavily focused on the technical details of science and technology with unnecessary long descriptions about each. It got so lengthy I sometimes forgot what the narrative was about.

If you're looking for something different, give this a try but it wasn't for me.