The Silent Corner, #1 in the Jane Hawk series by Dean Koontz, begins and 27-years-old Jane is introduced as an FBI agent who has gone rogue. Four months before her husband, a decorated Marine, took his own life and she is convinced that somehow his death was engineered. Her doubt leads her to look in the suicide statistics and she finds that they have been rising at an alarming rate the last few years. She then learns about nanotech brain implants and their connection to some of the suicides and it becomes her mission to find who is behind the conspiracy and what it is about
After beginning her investigation, Jane and her son’s life are threatened, so she hides young Travis with friends and sets out to find those responsible. She is targeted by drones and high-tech surveillance as she moves across California.
Jane learns that scientist Bertold Shennect has created implants that when injected into victims are being used to mind-control the escorts at a fancy brothel and she believes that they likely has a connection to the suicides. She visits the exotic brothel undetected and is haunted by what she finds.
Too stay undetected she uses burner cellphones and only computers in local libraries. Like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher she is expert at using her Heckler & Koch handgun. Jane Hawk is very smart as well as attractive and makes a convincing heroine for this new series.
The plot has plenty of twists and turns and clever touches. The humans that are under the control of the injections either commit suicide or serve in various ways. Those in day to day service are referred to as "rayshaws" after the name of the protagonist in The Manchurian Candidate. And the prose, as always in a Koontz novel, is first-rate.
A good start for what turns out to be an exciting series.
Quotes
“If you let the news spoil your appetite, there wouldn’t be a day you could eat.”
“Ideas shouldn’t matter more than people.”
“People should matter more than ideas.”
“the darkest desire of humankind—to hold absolute power, to control, to command obedience, to eliminate all voices of disagreement and dissent—had found its full expression.”