The Ascendant - Drew Chapman
Meet Garrett Reilly, happa twenty-something from Long Beach. Garrett possesses a rare talent; the ability to see patterns in wildly disparate data. Combined with a near-eidetic memory, that talent makes him a powerful force in his current job of Wall Street market analyst. He’s also an arrogant sonuvabitch with a chip on his shoulder the size of Nevada.
| When Garrett glimpses a pattern in sales of US treasury bonds, he sees a way to make buckets of money. His boss sees something more sinister, and tips off a pal at Treasury. That phone call trips a “sensor” in some shadowy military agency, and Garrett soon finds himself “drafted” into the military as the principal in the super-secret program code named The Ascendant. Garrett, he ultimately learns, has been chosen to lead US forces in the first war fought on twenty-first-century turf: the Internet. |
Reilly’s attitude is bad enough, but his methods are anathema to the establishment types in the government and the military. Armed only with his wits, a tiny team of gamers and hackers and a huge pile of equipment, Garrett will fight not only a shadow war against an inscrutable enemy but defend himself from conventional enemies as well; enemies within his own government. If he doesn’t succeed, millions of lives are at stake…
Veteran screenwriter Drew Chapman’s first novel hits all the high notes one might expect from a modern thriller. Chapman also liberally sprinkles the pages with pop-culture references (WoW, OWS, Red Bull) in what might seem to be one more shameless attempt to attract millennial and gen-X readers if the book weren’t so damned good in its own right.
And it is good – at least for the most part. Chapman’s included all the usual pieces of a thriller, including not just the conflict but the double-cross and back-biting. You’ve got your obligatory sidekick, your required gorgeous love interest, your typical trope savants with prodigious talent offset by limited social skills. On the other hand, Reilly is by no means a likable person and the growth of his character is uneven and in fits and starts.
Where The Ascendant succeeds is in Chapman’s ability to dress up a spy thriller crossed with The Dirty Dozen and “Mission Impossible” (the TV show, not the Tom Cruise movies) in internet garb. Not only that, but Chapman makes the whole thing fun. Never mind that the romance angle is unbelievable and clumsy and that a couple of critical plot threads are left dangling: my guess is that Chapman intends to turn this into a series, not unlike Ludlum’s Bourne narrative.
It all comes down to the fact that The Ascendant is a fun thriller that will keep you reading into the wee hours. Definitely worth a look.
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