Spark

February 2, 2015
Twelve Hawks’s new novel, set in a
dystopian near future, is told from the perspective of Jacob Underwood, the survivor of a terrible motorcycle accident that left him spiritually and emotionally dead. Lacking conscience, empathy, and fear, Jacob is the ideal contract killer for a secret department of a multinational organization named DBG that will do anything to smooth out corporate ruffles. Trouble begins when Jacob is ordered to kill the embezzling son-in-law of a brutal Indian power broker, along with the man’s daughter and young grandson. He quickly murders the thief, but can’t bring himself to dispatch the others—especially the child. He becomes even more reticent when he’s sent to find Emily Buchanan, a young DBG employee who’s gone missing with a flash drive containing information harmful to the corporation. He’s to recover the flash drive and kill Emily. When that doesn’t happen, both of them are on the run. Reader Brick uses an appropriately affectless voice for Jacob, but subtly adds just enough emotion to keep the narration engaging. Among his best interpretations are Jacob’s handler, Ms. Holquist, whose Southern accent doesn’t quite disguise her iron purpose; the gruff, sadistic Larkin Tate, another assassin and Jacob’s bête noir; the youthful Emily, who quickly loses her sunny disposition; and her eager and slightly naive boyfriend, Sean. A Doubleday hardcover.

August 4, 2014
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. Agent: Simon Lipskar, Writers House.

October 15, 2014
If you suffer from a condition that makes you think you're dead, robbing you of all human feeling, does that make you a better killer for hire? Hawks' latest dystopian adventure explores the possibilities.Since he suffered brain damage as the result of a motorcycle accident, New York facial recognition researcher Jacob Underwood has had Cotard's syndrome, a rare, actual affliction that creates a "living dead" state. Only by imagining his life force as a spark inside the shell of his physical being is he able to handle his "Transformation" and live in a corrupt world-a world in which nubots have replaced huge numbers of young Americans and Europeans in the workplace, leading to the violent mass demonstrations of the Day of Rage. He hates to be touched and subsists solely on a protein drink. Hired by a superpowerful New York conglomerate to eliminate embezzlers and snitches-he does need money to get by-he proves a brilliant and resourceful operative. But as coldly efficient as he is at shooting grown men and women, something tugs at his buried conscience when he's ordered to kill a whole family. The novel, told through his point of view, charts a significant change in his condition as he pursues a plucky young woman he oddly finds he's growing to like. The fascination, however, lies less in the plot than in the intricacies of Underwood's coping system, which the character explains through charts, diagrams and lists. What constitutes life? Doctors keep telling him he's still among the living, even if he lacks the emotion that makes people feel alive. Is he more alive than the nubots? With its fascinating protagonist, Hawks' first book since his Forth Realm trilogy sets itself apart from other futuristic thrillers.

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Starred review from September 1, 2014
The author of the Fourth Realm trilogy returns with a thriller about a contract killer who, following a brain injury, suffers from Cotard's syndrome, a (genuine) form of mental illness in which the afflicted person believes he or she is dead. Jacob's injury has totally changed his life; he needs a highly structured, uncluttered environment, and he needs to learn how to simulate all of the forms of human behavior that used to come naturally to him. But his new assignment, which involves locating (and then possibly killing) a missing woman, soon leads him into situations that are exceedingly disorganized and full of human emotion (which, as a dead man, he no longer experiences or understands). It's been several years since the Fourth Realm trilogy ended, and some readers might have wondered if the author had only one story to tell. But guess what? As good as the Fourth Realm books were, this one may be even more appealing: less fantastic, more grounded in a contemporary real world, with a narrator who is deeply scarred and endlessly fascinating.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)