Grady Elrod

Hello Cleveland! And Tulsa...and Fresno. The “Children of Darwin” have shut down your power grids. Enjoy the looting and fires, the food shortages and trigger-happy National Guardsmen who have been sent to quarantine you. Perhaps consider joining your local Neighborhood Watch. Sakey’s back, and you’re going to be in trouble, America. Nick Cooper is back too, and after a brief “leave” from the Department of Analysis and response, he takes a new job as special advisor to the new President (the last one having green-lighted an attack on American citizens, and consequently removed from office (as sometimes happens- but only sometimes)). Nick sees his primary goal as preventing a civil war between norms and abnorms, but he is opposed, on one side, by the nefarious Secretary of Defense Leahy and his associates in the intelligence-military-political complex who believe: A that they would benefit from a war against the abnorms (that one percent of us born “brilliant,” with special abilities an...

It is safe to assume that somewhere in Hollywood, Michael Bay is at this exact moment trying desperately to convince a studio executive to let him direct the movie version of Written In Fire. Did we have to have a book three in the Brilliance Trilogy? I guess we had to figure out exactly how blown up the New Canaan Holdfast was going to get. And whether our hero Nick Cooper ends up with his tough-as-nails, brilliant girlfriend, Shannon, or with his suddenly very interested ex-wife, Natalie. And whether the slimy Secretary of Defense Owen Leahy gets what’s coming to him, finally. And we do. Gunfire and explosions, vehicle crashes and daring escapes abound as former DAR agent Nick Cooper, now presumed dead by the administration, goes solo and tears around killing bad guys and trying to stop the imminent civil war between norms and abnorms. If it isn’t very predictable, it’s all predictably unpredictable, and for readers of Brilliance and A Better World it’s much more of the same.  Af...