There's Just One Word to Describe Marcus Sakey's Brilliance: "Brilliant!"

Nick Cooper – just “Cooper” to his friends – might be considered a traitor to his kind. His kind is the gifted, also known as brilliants, abnorms, twists, freaks… the small segment of humanity born with special abilities. Not X-Man powers like teleportation or pyrokinesis, though: just a little tweak to the brain that makes them much, much, much better at one thing than “normal” people. Imagine an NFL running back who can see where the defense will be in two seconds instead of where they are now; or a savant who can predict to the microsecond when any stock will rise or fall. Get the picture?

Cooper’s gift is pattern recognition. He can look at a person’s face and instinctively know what they’ll do; what they’ll say. He can even look at a person’s cell phone bill or credit card charges and figure out precisely where they’ll be tomorrow. That ability makes him invaluable to his employer; the government agency charged with fighting a “silent” war against abnorm terrorists, terrorists like John Smith. For a decade, Smith has been killing innocent civilians and, for a decade, “Equitable Services” and Cooper have been on his trail.

That’s about to change: in a desperate move, Cooper goes underground, into the giant Wyoming compound of the abnorms. His cover story? He triggered a terrorist bomb that killed over a thousand; and now his old unit is on his trail – and they’ll shoot first and ask questions later.

What Cooper learns inside that compound, however, will change his life…

MaddAddam: Margaret Atwood Completes the Crake Trilogy... Maybe

Who is MaddAddam? Or, perhaps more to the point, who was MaddAddam? After all, the waterless flood (as the Crakers call it) is so “last year,” and already the kudzu has started to bury all that is left of mankind’s many wonders, not to mention its many failures.

Once the BlyssPluss plague engineered by Crake had run its course, the few survivors peeked out of the rubble of the compounds and the plebelands and began to scratch together a new life in a new world. MaddAddam picks up where The Year of the Flood left off; as a handful of former God’s Gardeners have started a post-apocalyptic commune of sorts at the cobb house in the abandoned parklands. They’ve fortified the grounds to keep liobams (lion-lamb crossbreeds) away from their flock of Mo’Hairs (sheep genetically engineered to grow human hair) and keep the piggoons (super-smart giant pigs modified to grow human body parts) out of the garden. As for the roving painballers – a soft of dehumanized killing machine – they can do little but stand guard.

Four Stars at Amazon? What Have Those People Been Smoking!? David Wellington, "Chimera"

1.5 Stars out of 5: Oops!

You really, really want to feel good for Captain Jim Chapel. After all, he's a bona fide hero, having returned from duty in one of our dirty little wars minus his left arm, but he's still in his country's service. You want to feel proud for him… though it's a little hard since he still occasionally wallows in self-pity.

That seems about to change, though, when Chapel is tapped for a super-secret mission by the head of his employer, the DIA (an admiral, not some weenie general). It seems a handful of super-dangerous… criminals? detainees? experiments? have escaped from a super-secret compound hidden deep in the Poconos (is it possible to hide anything in the Poconos? I mean, really…) Now these indefatigable balls of inchoate rage have fanned out across the country looking for a list of eight people. Never mind for now how the DoD (or was it the CIA) got their paws on the list of names.

Promise Me You'll Leave Us Alone: Harlan Coben's "Six Years"

Every romance novel on the face of the earth would have you believe that there is “one true love” out there somewhere, a fated meeting just waiting for two pairs of eyes to lock together across a crowded room. It didn’t quite happen that way for Jake Fisher – Natalie Avery was wearing sunglasses the first time he laid eyes on her – but it was damned close. The two spent a couple of delirious months together at adjacent artistic retreats in upstate Vermont, long enough for Jake to decide Natalie was the fabled “one.” And then she dumped him – dumped him hard one day and sent him an invitation to her wedding the next. When the ceremony was concluded, she made Jake promise that he would never, ever contact her and her new husband.

Dan Brown's "Inferno": Bleeayahhhh...

It looks like Robert Langdon is at it again. The Harvard professor of symbology (and, apparently, art history [and medieval literature, too]) awakens to find himself in an Italian hospital, a bullet wound in his scalp, and two days missing from his memory. Rattling around his addled brain are a sense of foreboding and a snippet of memory of a beautiful woman with silver hair. When a black-clad assassin bursts into the hospital room and murders a doctor before his eyes, he escapes into the night with another doctor - a beautiful bald-headed English polyglot genius - only to realize he's in his favorite city in the whole wide world, Florence. Firenze. Whatever.

A hidden pocket in his Harris Tweed jacket yields a strange device that projects an image of Botticelli's La Mappa dell'Inferno, a map of Hell as envisioned by Dante. What follows next should be no surprise to those who devoured Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, and The Lost Symbol. I mean it: no surprise...

The image has been subtly altered to... well, it's Dan Brown and Robert Langdon, so of course it's been subtly altered to provide clues to... who knows? We know: an evil genius has set some arcane plan in motion, a plan that only Langdon and his latest sexy sidekick, Sienna, can prevent. Maybe. Maybe not.