Name: Zero sum game
ISBN: 9781250180254

S. L. Huang

Cas Russell is good at math. Scary good. The vector calculus blazing through her head lets her smash through armed men twice her size and dodge every bullet in a gunfight, and she'll take any job for the right price. As far as Cas knows, she's the only person around with a superpower...until she discovers someone with a power even more dangerous than her own. Someone who can reach directly into people's minds and twist their brains into Moebius strips. Someone intent on becoming the world's puppet master. Cas should run, like she usually does, but for once she's involved. There's only one problem... She doesn't know which of her thoughts are her own anymore.

Zero sum game

Fraser Simons

This had some interesting stuff going on, especially given how tropey the potential for the antagonist to be in a techno thriller type book such as this. It is a lot of fun and is a strange hybrid. It definitely feels like commercial fiction in terms of flow, pacing, dialogue, and diction. But the techno aspects are also far more developed than that kind of fiction too. It’s granular in its mathematics and in its themes, especially regarding “free will”, which was a pleasant surprise. 

I think if you really like both of those kinds of fiction, especially action movies and one-liners and what not, it would be a perfect sweet spot for you. I wanted more of the later and something more literary, finding the dialogue especially a bit cringe worthy. But it was still plenty of enjoyable.