Publisher's Weekly Review
An eccentric genius is all that stands between the U.S. and total financial collapse in Chapman's first-rate sequel to 2014's The Ascendant. Garrett Reilly, who has a gift for detecting patterns, has put that talent to work in creating the Ascendant project, "an attempt to assemble a team of out-of-the-mainstream thinkers to help America fight the next generation of wars." Though the program succeeded in thwarting a Chinese cyberattack, Garrett quit after suffering psychological and physical damage. Now his work as an investment analyst alerts him to another alarming problem-evidence of an "enormous pool of money" accumulated in a private equity exchange. Meanwhile, a hit woman murders the head of the New York Federal Reserve; she accuses Garrett of ordering the killing before taking her own life. The allegation puts him on the run and into the path of an elusive Russian crook who may be his intellectual equal. Chapman makes the battle of wits as suspenseful as a standard action thriller. Agent: Markus Hoffmann, Regal Literary. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Terrorism, economic warfare, and "too big to fail" banks lend this thriller a sense of urgency. Who knew international economics, the Federal Reserve Bank, and a room full of geeks could be so much fun, though Chapman gave us a hint in the first novel in this series, The Ascendant (2014). Things aren't good for Garrett Reilly: constant agony from a skull fracture drives him to take painkillers by the fistful as he searches for patterns of trades in his job on Wall Street. "Seeing patterns came naturally to him; he felt them as much as saw them." And see one he doesa "dark pool" of money has been "buying and selling stocks in coordination with real-world events"a stock would take a tumble, and then a seemingly random, unrelated crime would take place somewhere around the world. Just as Reilly notices the pattern, it sweeps him up: someone kills the president of the New York Federal Reserve, then implicates Reilly in the crime before putting a gun to her own head. The novel takes off in a hunt to find out why. Enter Russian bad guy Ilya Markov, economic assassin and Reilly's intellectual doppelgnger. Markov learns the patterns of potential pawns and uses their predictability for his master plan. Reilly knows he needs more eyes watching, researching, in order to find this expert manipulator and calls on Ascendant, his team of misfits, not happy to be together again after their first engagement with the turbulent and arrogant Reilly. Garrett puts together a profile from the crime patterns, and when a passport triggers an alert, the team focuses on Markov, who's in deep cover for a Russian-sponsored attack on the economy of the United States. He thinks like Reilly and outmaneuvers him through the twists and turns of this action-packed novel. Ascendant frantically connects the dots to Markov's ultimate target and ends up in a game of chicken. The pawn in this endgame is Alexis Truffant, Reilly's love interest from the first novel, and the gamble is breathtaking. Chapman again delivers a crisp thriller, tapping themes of our times that daily news has made commonplace. And once again he has left it open-ended, teasing us in anticipation of the next novel in series. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Pattern-recognition savant Garrett Reilly and his high-tech Ascendant team saved the U.S. economy from a Chinese cyberattack in The Ascendant (2015). Now, back in his workaday role as a bond trader, Garrett detects unusual activity in the financial sector but doesn't get involved until the president of the Federal Reserve is murdered by a woman who claims Garrett forced her to kill. As the FBI descends, Garrett goes underground and covertly reconvenes Ascendant, certain that the assassination is the first salvo in another attack on the U.S. economy. Ascendant quickly identifies Ilya Markov, a Chechen coder familiar with the American tech industry, as the plot's architect, and he and Garrett begin trading virtual blows with real-world consequences. This time, the motive and backers of Markov's attack are murky, which adds an intriguing layer of Eastern European politics to the tech battle. This breathless follow-up to The Ascendant remains faithful to its predecessor's complex characterization and suspenseful, dynamic portrayal of the exotic high-tech world.--Tran, Christine Copyright 2016 Booklist