Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Technothrillers

Our narrator is the most talented salesperson at Dare to Know, an enigmatic company that has developed the technology to predict anyone’s death down to the second. Divorced, estranged from his sons, and broke, he is driven to violate the cardinal rule of the business by forecasting his own death day. The problem: His prediction says he died 23 minutes ago. The only person who can confirm its accuracy is Julia, the woman he loved and lost during his rise up the ranks of Dare to Know.

Over the Atlantic in the dark of night, the electronic brain of Pangia Airlines Flight 10 quietly and without warning disconnects all the cockpit controls and reverses course on its own. The crew of the huge Airbus 330 at first senses nothing, the flight displays still showing them on course to New York. But with puzzled passengers reporting stars on the wrong side—not to mention armed fighters pulling alongside to force them to land—the confused pilots discover that Flight 10 is streaking back toward the hyper-volatile Middle East, and there is nothing they can do about it.

In the Czar’s Suite of Kiev’s five-star Persian Palace, police discover a body jammed impossibly deep in a narrow ventilation duct. Security cameras reveal that no one else entered the supersecure room. An ocean away, Interpol rookie Delta Devlin witnesses an attempted assassination, but the bullet meant for the Ukrainian prime minister hits her father instead, lodging next to his heart. Investigations reveal that ex-KGB operator Yuri Korshunov smuggled a 3D-printed plastic gun into the UN Building.

Just a few hundred genes separate humans from chimpanzees. Imagine someone altering the chimp genome, splicing in human genes to increase the size of the cranium, reduce the amount of body hair, enable speech. What sort of creature would result? Sims takes place in the very near future, when the science of genetics is fulfilling its vaunted potential. A world where dangerous or boring manual labor is gradually being transferred to “sims”, genetically altered chimps who occupy a gray zone between simian and human.

Imperium is the most expensive structure ever created. Once an orbiting laboratory, it is now a space hotel for the fantastically wealthy. But as the station preps for its first group of space tourists, Dr. Chloe Bonilla, Imperium’s resident biophysicist, finds herself questioning whether babysitting a passel of space glampers is worth the distraction from her research.

Critical components of the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful supercollider and largest machine ever built, have been stolen, and Delta Devlin is brought in by Interpol to investigate. At the same time, a dead body appears washed up on the shores of the East River in Delta’s hometown of New York City - one with very similar injuries to those left by the serial killer she caught to start her career.

Lieutenant Dev Singh dutifully spends his days recording the memories of people who, struck with incurable depression, will soon have their minds erased in order to be more productive members of society. At night though, hidden in the dark, Dev remembers and writes in his secret journal the special moments shared with him—the small laugh of a toddler, the stillness of a late afternoon, the first flutter of love. But when the Bureau finds out that he has been recounting the memories—and that the depression is in him too—he is sent to a sanitarium to heal.

A few hundred years into the future, a wave of space colonization follows a disastrous earlier attempt to inhabit nearby extrasolar planets. It is guided by a new computational method based on massive data-driven sociocultural and socio-epidemiological modeling and using novel biological computers, fed with data on Earth’s history of successes and failures.

The last Blockbuster video store in the United States is hanging on by a thread. And after a crazy night attempting to track down a lost VCR rental to collect the record-setting and internet-famous late fee, three employees, idealistic Eva, cinephile Jerry, and their tyrannical manager Randy, discover that this machine may actually have the power to change the endings of popular films, which, depending on the historical basis of the film, might also be changing the real world around them. Or could this just be an elaborate, increasingly deadly prank?

The Chameleon, an Artificial Intelligence expert, can create a deepfake of almost anyone—living or dead. Even more frightening is the Chameleon’s ability to seek out disturbed souls and laser-focus their rage. A talent she employs to compel her subjects to commit violence on her behalf. Kylee Kane, a security consultant for Welch HOA Management, finds the Chameleon’s first victim, Andy Fyke, crumpled at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Kylee suspects the fall’s no accident and is tied to Andy’s campaign to prohibit rentals in his Hilton Head Island community.