Brain Thief

Alexander Jablokov returns to SF with his best book ever.

Bernal Haydon-Rumi, executive assistant to a funder of eccentric projects, drops by his boss' house on the way home from a business trip. By the next morning, he's been knocked out, his wealthy socialite boss Muriel has stolen a car and vanished, and the AI designed for planetary exploration that she's been funding turns out to be odder than it should be. In figuring out what's going on, Bernal has to deal with an anti-AI activist toting a handmade electronic arsenal, a local serial killer, a drug dealer with a business problem, a cryonic therapist stalked by past mistakes – and someone who specifically wants Bernal dead.

Brain Thief is a fun, literate speculative fiction adventure, sort of New England cyberpunk noir, set a year or ten from now, somewhere between the Berkshires and Boston, and includes, at no extra charge, a 30-foot-tall fibreglass cowgirl.

Praise for Alexander Jablokov

"With an array of quirky characters and a tornado of a plot that doesn't stop twisting until the last page, here is the science fiction page turner of 2010 ... At once hilarious and scary, this is the Alexander Jablokov novel we have been waiting for!" - James Patrick Kelly, Hugo and Nebula Award winner, on Brain Thief; "The influences on this fine first novel range from Alfred Bester to Umberto Eco, but Mr. Jablokov has his own way with words." - The New York Times Book Review on Carve the Sky; "A writer with a style and substance all his own." - The Minneapolis Star Tribune on The Breath of Suspension.