It's rare that a publisher and author can dance their calendars so well that book 2 in a series is published before you've lost the stinging memories of book 1 -- but Eric Rickstad and Blackstone Publishing have made it work, just in time for some properly creepy summer reading.
Book 1 in the series, called Remote: The Six, released on April 8; this week, book 2, REMOTE: THE FIVE, is available. Although it's an author's job to give enough scaffolding so you can jump into a later book in a series and not feel lost, the double premises behind Rickstad's plotting mean you'll appreciate this new volume more if you've read the first one; I'll paste that review below, since the publication where it appeared abruptly vanished this spring (alas).
Premise 1: Serial killings of entire families are taking place, with FBI Special Agent Lukas Stark assigned to identify the murderer and stop him. Means and opportunity aren't hard to pull together, but motive depends on this next part --
Premise 2: Gilles Garnier, also known as X, is one of six people raised with a new-to-humans ability: They can "remote view," that is, see and hear what's happening in some other location. The killings are his part of his psychotic effort to find or create other remote viewers.
Hold on -- before you discard the notion as too far from reality, bear in mind that the author's "discussion topics" from the first book reveal that he's based this on a CIA research program, historically real. He's clearly spent major effort on the FBI procedures involved in Agent Stark's efforts, too. In effect, Rickstad is shifting a dark crime novel just a bit further along into what the future could bring -- so in that sense, park this book in the "dystopian" genre, too. And who isn't grimly interested in dystopian fiction just now, in an effort to understand what's going on in our scary global situations??
As REMOTE: THE FIVE opens, it seems another of the remote viewers, S, is turning to murder:
This woman, suspected of the murders of two MIT researchers in the field of bioengineering and genome modification, had the same strange scar on the back of her neck that Garnier and Q had. This woman whom Garnier suspected of being manipulated by the program, as was Q, into murdering a list of individuals in the hope of maintaining or strengthening their fading remote-viewing abilities. Of course, it might really have been only a test by the program to see how far the two would go to maintain their ability—to determine how strong their addiction to that power really was.
There's that dystopian note: "addiction to power."
Stark and Garnier head in separate directions, each pursuing a persistent hunch about the ongoing murders. The FBI agent has his own twist: He seems unable to let go of pursing the case, even when his own wife and small child are in enormous danger. And Garnier appears to be dying. So, will the case be solved before Garnier can't even walk and wake, or before Stark carries his own trauma from childhood into another generation?
If you like all threads neatly tidied by the end of a book, don't try this one -- there are quite a few strands left dangling at the end, and there's little resolution of the threats that seem only to deepen. But for those hooked on the estrangement and bitterness of noir (or related dystopia), this is a prime candidate for book of the summer. Of course, the sequence of titles and the rough-edged ending to REMOTE: THE FIVE make it clear there are more books ahead in the series, so it's understandable that threads dangle. Rickstad has left more of them unresolved than is usual, so book 3 will need to carry a lot of power.
Let's see how soon the next book will come to the shelves!
BOOK 1 review, originally published in the New York Journal of Books:
Remote: The Six, The Remote Series Book 1 by Eric Rickstad
Kudos to Blackstone for opting to release both of the first two books in Eric Rickstad’s new Remote Series within the same year: book 1 now, and book 2 in July. The suspense raised by this new thriller, Remote: The Six, could otherwise be close to unbearable—because Rickstad is a master of suspense and quickly ramps up both tension and personal threat for FBI Special Agent Lukas Stark. On the road, constantly falling behind the attacks of a brutal serial killer, Stark is all too aware that this man is deliberately assaulting families. Like his own, his wife and eight-year-old son, whom he hasn’t seen in literally months, thanks to his job.
Stark appears to be mostly a lone hunter, with support from forensic teams wherever he lands to assess the latest deaths. “The FBI had not been brought in until the third murdered family … made it clear through MO—victims bound to chairs, wife’s throat cut, father and children bludgeoned—that there was likely a single killer working across state lines.” So he’s doing his own assessments, asking creative questions, probing behavioral and psychological patterns. Rickstad doesn’t hold back on the twists from the start: Just a few pages in, Stark reflects that he knows “all too well the bloody fingerprint a father’s violence left on a son’s soul.”
So in many ways, Stark’s solo hunting for the serial killer is a perfect fit for his own damaged self. Alas, he’s got less than one chapter of the book to hunt that way, as his superior, an FBI Special Agent in Charge, arrives without warning on the latest crime scene, with a very strange civilian in tow. Stark is expected to take on as a partner this peculiar and intrusive man, who reminds him of “a secretary bird, which takes flight only when pressed by imminent danger.”
Yet this is also the moment when Rickstad’s ground-shaking crime novel crosses over into speculative fiction (what used to be only called sci fi), because Gilles Garnier has his own way of searching for the perpetrator: something called remote viewing, which lets him see what someone else is looking at.
Stark’s very unhappy with the notion, which reminds him of course of all the fraudulent or at best useless psychics he’s already seen in action. Rickstad then cleverly braids together several long processes: of Stark revealing only to himself his own internal damage, of the frustrations of the serial killer, and of Gilles Garnier confessing what he’s actually doing, and how he’s gained the capacity to do it. (For those who hate crawling inside the minds of gruesome killers and their terrified victims, this book’s a good thriller for you, because those aspects don’t take up a lot of the narrative.) The pacing is impressive, the dialogue and twists highly satisfying, and by the time Stark himself is unraveling, it’s all too clear why.
Equally intriguing is Stark’s own theory of the killer, which involves a biochemical form of addiction to arousal. He’s aware that the theory makes him an outsider, and even Gilles Garnier agrees it will put off the other professionals: “Addiction implies a lack of free will, of personal responsibility.” But might this be the case anyway?
This is indeed book 1, so there are a couple of scary dangling threads at the end. (Not long to wait until they’re back in play, with July 8 the predicted release date for book 2, Remote: The Five.) But Rickstad also offers some startling information in his promotional “discussion topics,” which include the presence of historically real serial killers in his home state, and a CIA research program, also historically real, on remote viewing. Maybe the sci-fi side of the book is actually a view into something scary and very possible, after all.
