Brilliance by Marcus Sakey

Originally published on 11/4/2013

The plan for Sunday...chores. Of course, reading is always on the "to do" list, but I told myself it was going to be minimal. One chapter over coffee, two chapters max. And then hours later, with breakfast dishes still on the counter I finished Brilliance by Marcus Sakey. So much for self-control. And productivity.

In Brilliance, one percent of the next generation of children are born with extraordinary emotional, spatial, musical, or mathematical gifts. These "brilliants" have the ability to improve society, but might just as easily decide to crash the stock market or hack military weapons systems. Naturally, the government steps in to manage the education of young brilliants with boarding schools and biometric devices. Activities by suspicious adult brilliants are monitored by the Department of Analysis and Response (DAR) in order to prevent acts damaging to the country. Nick Cooper is a brilliant and top agent of the DAR due to his ability in recognizing body language patterns. Cooper's job: to locate and apprehend the abnorms (brilliants gone bad). When intelligence chatter warns of an imminent threat on the financial markets Nick rushes to prevent it, but is unable to. In the aftermath, his search to find the terrorist responsible for the attack forces him to reexamine where his loyalties lie.

-Elizabeth