Inventive SF crime thriller pitting feds against “the king of the mindhackers.”

Great for fans of Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead, Simon Jimenez’s The Vanished Birds.

SF/FANTASY/HORROR

Dreaming Under an Electric Moon Kris Powers | Star Lore Productions 226p, e-book, $9.99, ISBN 979-8-870-22974-4

In this genre-blending future thriller, FBI agents Zahra Washington and Mason Deane, a mind hacker, team up to “rescue the world from certain destruction” after investigating mysterious murders and a suspect who swears she’s been framed. Set in an imaginative future of hologram news, underwater colonies, and a U.S. that’s no longer united, Powers’s debut pits the agents against a high-tech mind-controlling killer named Moloch, “king of the mindhackers,” who’s bent on taking over the world one host at a time, making everyone a drone. “You’re reasonably intelligent,” Moloch tells Deane, early on. “That will make your brain easier to rewire.” Then Moloch divides into an army and rushes for him.

Inventive and unsettling scenes like that power Dreaming Under an Electric Moon, a fast-paced, impossible-to-predict ride starring two sharp-witted FBI agents each equipped with their own special set of skills. Powers pushes the narrative forward with surprising action, laugh-out-loud banter, and a tense storyline that takes full advantage of its future setting. Teaming up with software expert Ernestine Paul and her “black market guy,” Garrett, the agents and their assembled team search both virtually online and multiple real-world locations to find Edward Blunt, the mysterious and supposedly dead creator of the vU, the virtual-reality “universe,” in the hopes that he can help them stop Moloch, who is gathering countless drones.

In their race to save humanity, the team encounters characters from vNovels, aliens, ghoul-clowns, and Moloch himself in multiple hosts, creating a creepy level of distrust and uncertainty over who is an ally and who is the enemy. Blending shoe-leather procedural work, bursts of crisp but wild action, a viral update on super villainy, and a concluding reminder of the temptations of abusing cheat codes, this tech-run-amok plot will please fans of stories of investigating disturbing VR futures.

Cover: B | Design & typography: A- | Illustrations: A Editing: A | Marketing copy: A