Skinner
*Starred Review* This tour de force features two of the most interesting characters we’ve seen in years. Skinner, a savant-like killer who struggles to interpret emotions and to speak with normal affect, spent his formative years as part of a bizarre experiment—an origin story that unfolds piece by broken piece, each one with fascinating complications. His job is to protect Jae, a damaged, emotionally fragile robotics expert and data analyst with an amazing capacity to sift meaning from massive streams of information. She’s supposed to find the source of an attack on the U.S. power grid. But the motives of the people who’ve hired them are maddeningly elusive, and, as the job leads them through Europe toward an unlikely plot in a Mumbai slum, they have to wonder whether they’re pawns in one of the most circuitous bait-and-switches of all time. Huston’s world, where powerful private security firms battle each other for access to the “new markets” created by global chaos, is cynical, chilling, and eminently believable. The plot itself may be a bit of a stretch, but this is mind-bendingly original, from the characters, to the dialogue, to the sensory-overloaded world that feels eerily like the one we’re about to live in. Add Huston (Sleepless, 2010) to the A-list. --Keir Graff