Quick Pick Book Review: Upgrade, by Blake Crouch

• Opening lines: We found Henrik Soren at a wine bar in the international terminal, thirty minutes from boarding a hyperjet to Tokyo.
  
  Before tonight, I had only seen him in INTERPOL photographs and CCTV footage. In the flesh, he was less impressive—five and a half feet in his artificially distressed Saint Laurent sneakers with a designer hoodie hiding most of his face. He was sitting at the end of the bar with a book and a bottle of Krug.
• Reason I picked up the book: I read Recursion by Blake Crouch for my book club, and really enjoyed it.
• And what's this book about?
  “You are the next step in human evolution.”
  
  At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little . . . sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep.
  
  But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways.
  
  The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy.
  
  Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost.
  
  Because of his new abilities, Logan’s the one person in the world capable of stopping what’s been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he’ll have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.
  
  And even as he’s fighting, he can’t help wondering: what if humanity’s only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution?
  
  Intimate in scale yet epic in scope, Upgrade is an intricately plotted, lightning-fast tale that charts one man’s thrilling transformation, even as it asks us to ponder the limits of our humanity—and our boundless potential.
• Recommended for: Anyone who enjoys sci-fi or dystopian books, or books about gene editing.
• Favorite paragraph: Scythe was the revolutionary, biological DNA modifier system—now extremely illegal—discovered and patented by my mother, Miriam Ramsay. It had been a seismic leap forward that left the previous generations of technologies—ZFNs, TALENs, CRISPR-Cas9—gasping in the dust. Scythe had ushered in a new era of gene editing and delivery, one that brought about catastrophic results. Which is why getting caught using or selling it for germline modification—the making of a new organism—came with a mandatory thirty-year prison sentence.
• Something to know: I would love to see this book made into a movie—definitely would be very exciting, and I could probably come up with a dream cast if I thought about it, as well.
• What I would have changed: Not sure I would have changed anything. 
• Overall rating: 4 stars out of 5.
• Where can I find this book? Click here to pre-order on Amazon—it will be out on July 13, 2022.

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Book Review and GIVEAWAY: Good Behavior, by Blake Crouch {ends 11/8}

She sipped her drink and stared at the napkin the barkeep had left on the table. Four handwritten four-digit numbers. Took her thirty seconds to memorize them, and a quick look around confirmed what she had hoped—the window washers and the hotel guests remained locked and absorbed in their own worlds. She lifted the napkin and slid the keycard out from underneath it, across the glass tabletop and into her grasp. Then shredded the napkin, sprinkling the pieces into the hissing water.

I was interested to read this book, which ended up being a collection of 3 short stories, because TNT is premiering a TV show of the same name this month. I had heard about the TV show at BlogHer this year, as well, since they had a booth there. The stories ended up being pretty interesting, and the show should be good too.

Official synopsis:

The bestselling author of Dark Matter and Wayward Pines, Blake Crouch’s Good Behavior centers on Letty Dobesh, his favorite character creation of all time, and will be available in print and eBook from Thomas & Mercer on November 15th. TNT’s new television series (of the same name) starring Michelle Dockery also launches November 15th at 9pm ET/PT.

Featuring a special introduction and “behind-the-story” commentaries on the adaptation from Crouch, as well as a look at his earliest inklings of Letty in journal entries from 2009, both book formats will include photos from the set, and the eBook will feature video scenes from the new TNT series. Readers will transition seamlessly between Letty’s adventures on the page and Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery in live action as she brings the character to life on screen.

Fresh out of prison and fighting to keep afloat, Letty Dobesh returns to her old tricks burglarizing suites at a luxury hotel. While on the job, she overhears a man hiring a hit man to kill his wife. Letty may not be winning any morality awards, but even she has limits. Unable to go to the police, Letty sets out to derail the job, putting herself on a collision course with the killer that entangles the two of them in a dangerous, seductive relationship.

Good Behavior comprises three interlinked novellas, The Pain of Others, Sunset Key, and Grab, which together form a novel-length portrait of Letty Dobesh.

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