Spark
A Novel
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4.0 • 68 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
THE MOST DANGEROUS ASSASSIN IS THE ONE WHO BELIEVES HE IS ALREADY DEAD.
A razor-sharp, high-tech, wildly imaginative new novel from internationally bestselling author John Twelve Hawks, Spark features a narrator unlike any in recent fiction—a man whose view of life and death is different from anything you’ve ever imagined.
Jacob Underwood is a contract employee of the Special Services Section, a small shadow department buried within the multinational corporation DBG, headquartered in New York City. Jacob is not a businessman . . . he is a hired assassin . . . and his job is to neutralize problems deemed unacceptable by the corporation. But Jacob is not like other employees, nor is he like other people. After a catastrophic motorcycle accident leaves him with Cotard’s syndrome—an actual condition that causes those afflicted to believe they are dead—Jacob perceives himself as nothing but a “Shell,” with no emotions and no tether to the concept of right and wrong.
Emily Buchanan is a bright young second-year associate for DBG, and she has disappeared without a trace. Suspecting that Emily has stolen either vast sums of money or valuable information from the company, Ms. Holquist, Jacob’s handler at DBG, assigns him the task of tracking down the young woman and neutralizing her. Jacob’s condition allows him to carry out assignments with ruthless, logical precision, devoid of guilt, fear, or dishonor. But as his new assignment draws him inside a labyrinthine network of dark dealings, Jacob finds himself up against something he is completely incapable of understanding.
Shifting with riveting precision from New York to London, Paris to New Delhi, Spark is a thriller that delves into the surveillance state we prognosticate today . . . and will live in tomorrow. In the hands of master storyteller John Twelve Hawks, a unique character’s startling transformation comes to life, making Spark a thriller that resonates and satisfies on many levels.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his first outing since concluding the Four Realms trilogy, bestseller Twelve Hawks returns to the same dystopian milieu in this engaging but predictable thriller, set in a future landscape of paranoid government control, blanket surveillance, and extreme economic disparities. Jacob Underwood, an assassin, works for an enormous New York City multinational that often needs to eliminate a threat. Underwood's strength as a hired killer is the emotionless, robotic nature that allows him to operate with logical, ruthless precision. Doctors have long told him, however, that the condition that makes him so effective could gradually wear off. And that's exactly what happens when he is tasked with killing the fascinatingly offbeat Emily Buchanan, a minor employee who has absconded with financial secrets from her company and is threatening to expose them on a WikiLeaks-type website. Twelve Hawks's prose, cold and clinical at times, yet punctuated with moments of great sensitivity, matches the tone and mood of his setting perfectly.
