Last week, I finished “Calculated,” by Nova McBee, a thriller about saving the world and breaking up an international organized crime ring. The main character uses five or six names throughout the book, and has a gift of mathematics that allows her to predict the future. Her gift is also something of curse in that everything she sees becomes numbers and probabilities.
I bought this book because I have seen the author speak twice, and wow, when it comes to being an enthusiastic promoter of your work, she’s amazing.
I liked this book because it had an imaginative allegory of the story of an Old Testament prophet. (Saying which one as that would be a spoiler.) Also, the main character’s emotional changes around forgiveness are powerful and interesting. Her desire to do the right thing while surrounded by wicked people and wicked institutions is a challenge that kept me turning the pages. The narration is breezy and lively, and when she’s on the run from the bad guys or chasing them down, it’s quite engaging.
Again, I liked this book, but I did not love it. The superhero-style plot is mismatched with the real-world setting, and this sets up gaping holes in plausibility. In this book, the world is threatened by a coming crash and depression caused by excess capital from central banks. The main character’s solution to this is to convince a Chinese tycoon who owns a $100 billion company to inject money into the economy. Which is basically what the Federal Reserve and other central banks do on the scale of trillions. Furthermore, the main character seems to think accounting and economics are the same thing, and she’s able to pull resources out of the air in a confusing manner. Sometimes she’s a prisoner, sometimes she’s an employee, but when the plot needs it, she’s able to make millions of dollars quickly and use them to buy warehouses and sometimes entire companies in her efforts to catch the bad guys. And does she have a staff of a thousand people to run these companies she buys?
Calculated is the first of three books in a series, with the second two being Simulated and Activated, and they’re all from Wise Wolf Books, a (publisher info). Also, in the seminar that Nova gave recently, she said that she’s sold the movie option for the book, so it’ll be interesting to see how that production develops. She also explained how Hollywood works in acquiring the rights to books and screenplays. In book publishing, you get a gazillion rejections before you finally score a yes. In Hollywood, they tell you yes multiple times until they say “eh, actually we don’t have the ability to develop that.” And then you start over.
So, Calculated. Fun book with interesting Biblical themes. Worth checking out.
