Thanks to Timothy Zahn, Aethon Books, and NetGalley for access to the Advanced Reader Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I picked up this book knowing that Timothy Zahn was an excellent writer and a Hugo award winner for his science fiction. Quite to my surprise, what I got was an outstanding technology thriller that could be ripper from today’s headlines.

The characters are interesting and believable, the pacing is good and there are enough twists and turns to always keep you on your toes. Given Timothy Zahn’s history, I hope and expect this is the start of a series. Recommended.

My linking to Goodreads is not working correctly, so I am attaching here manually:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6372793404

The two major premises of this book are that a group has stolen an Indian nuclear bomb with a plan to use it to disrupt the government of their country. Who they are is not clear until the last 20% of the book, making the story even more astonishing. At the same time in a company in Silicon Valley, three scientists are murdered and their new breakthrough stolen. the breakthrough is a material that can be used to make anything put under the cloth to disappear. The only weekness in the "cloak" is that it only works if whats under it doesn't move.

As we follow the agents of the US government looking for the murderers, the thiefs are continuing with their pursuit of getting the bomb to where they have planned to use it. To move the bomb they have to frustrate anyone who is looking for it. As you follow the two prong stories, the bad guys seem to always be one or two steps ahead of the good guys. The mastermind behind the theft of the bomb and the use of the cloaks to assist hiding it is like a well orchestrated ballet.

This is a well written and thought out book and should be interesting for anyone who likes adventure and military stories.

A thrill ride from the beginning. A stolen nuke, a clock of invisibility start the ride. A large cast of characters make up the rest. Hard to put down.

<b>Overview</b>
Cloaked Deception is a techno-political-ish spy thriller set in the current/near-future. While I mostly picked this up because Zahn is the author who got me into SF as a kid, it was a decently fun read, if a little bloated.
<b>The Good</b>
This story had a fun plot. I wouldn't entirely agree with the claim in the blub that you can't see the twist coming, but anticipating it was actually more of a benefit to the plot than a determent. As with any techno-thriller, there were some spots where Zahn asked you to take a tiny leap with him on the idea; however, there was only two, and the leap was so small that it didn't require much suspension of disbelief. Perhaps this is my very long history of reding SF/F kicking in here.
The characters were all really enjoyable, even the ones whose face I wanted to see punched before the end, which is good, but it means that...
<b>The Bad</b>
Because I liked the characters, I feel like I didn't really get enough time with them. The emphasis is much more on the political and military aspect, so to a certain degree this makes sense. That said...
<b>The Ugly</b>
There are so many characters. I took a wild guess, just based on how certain characters were being written at the beginning, about who the main characters were, and I was right, but by the end I think I could make a solid argument for there being anywhere between one and five main characters. This, by the way, is not the total number of POV's in the book, just the one's I felt like I was supposed to be the most interested in. I honestly could not keep up with all the names, and I only managed to start recognizing the main characters about halfway through. Up to that point, I was just using context clues. This book practically needs a spreadsheet just to keep up with the characters, about half of which are POV characters at some point. If you are great at names, enjoy Excel, comfortable with "figuring it out" as you go (or if the publishers add some sort of chapter/section headers to let you know who the POV is and where they are in this new scene), this may not be a problem for you.
There is a major point of serendipity. Major <spoiler>spoilers, but some of the technology just happens to be ready at the right time. It was only really evident in retrospect, but it could also have been explained away by the bad guy having just changed some plans at the last minute.</spoiler>

Thanks to NetGalley and Aethon Books for sending this book for review consideration. All opinions are my own.

Timothy Zahn is one of my go-to authors for science fiction. This was my first look at his work in another genre, and I was wiling to follow along because I enjoy his work so much. There was a lot to appreciate here for fans of Zahn as well as readers of authors like Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy.

3.5 rounded up
This was a bit long for my tastes. I love Mr. Zahn's writing and Star Wars books; maybe I had higher expectations. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book

Mediocre political scifi thriller. Characters are tropes and not well written. I wasn't particularly gripped and found this to be fairly disappointing.

I really thought this book was going to be about a man getting his revenge. Unfortunately this really only felt like I was reading a generic detective mystery. Totally not what I was wanting to read. Was still quick and full of action but I was confused as to what I thought it was about. Thanks Netgalley for letting me read this one early.

A tactical nuclear weapon is stolen from an Indian research facility, setting off a chain of events that spans the globe.

Those behind the heist plan to use it to take out thousands of innocent people—all to assure death of a single man who they believe is too dangerous to be left alive.

What are the lives of thousands compared to the safety of the world?

At the same time, scientists have invented the world’s first cloaking device, able to render its user almost completely invisible. It’s the epitome of hidden-in-plain-sight—a game changer for any military. At least until three of the lead scientists are murdered and their work is stolen the night before their first demonstration.

Authorities have no idea the two crimes are connected.
There are ten days before the bomb is set to go off.

Can they unravel the trail of red herrings in time?

The clock is ticking...


A very fun techno thriller which is a bit of a genre bender. Lots of twists and turns in this fast paced sci fi adventure. There is a lot to love in this book. While not perfect, I found it to be quite enjoyable!

Fantastic. A fast paced thriller filled with twists and turns. A lot of threads and characters to figure 0ut at the start but it soon settles into two main story arcs - the theft of "invisibility cloaks" and a missing tactical nuke. It takes quite a while for the two stories to come together and the chapters switch back and forth between the two investigations. But, well laid out, easy to read and plenty of action. Really enjoyed it.
Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

A fresh new techno-thriller blends the espionage action of Mission Impossible, with gritty noir-esque detective work, immersed in a world of geopolitical intrigue comes in the form of Timothy Zahn’s new standalone novel Cloaked Deception.

Timothy Zahn should be a household name for those who enjoy the expanded Star Wars novels, rising to fame with his Thrawn series, among other tales in the expanded universe that are now considered canon in the franchise. What he is not as well known for is his catalog of standalone fiction novels, among which Cloaked Deception is the newest offering.

As an opening caveat, the cover of Cloaked Deception paints a vibe of a cybernoir/SciFi story which led me to pick up the novel to write an advanced review. Sadly, this is not a Sci-Fi novel in the traditional sense. While it does include a piece of “futuristic” technology as a major plot-driving thingamajig, the rest of the plot is smack dab in a present-day setting. I was unable to shake off that feeling of being “cheated” by my expectations and that negatively influenced my entire mood while reading this book.

Cloaked Deception is your bog-standard military espionage/spy-thriller with a bit of futurism thrown in as a gimmick. The dragged through the molasses trope of a nuclear threat from hidden enemies is a tale best left to Die Hard-level pulpy action flicks and the hyperchurn of novels that James Patterson puts out every month. Zahn tries to add his sprinkle of spice by tacking on a parallel plot of the “futuristic” piece of tech, viz. an invisibility cloak-esque fabric designed to strengthen the American war machine, which promptly gets stolen to assist with the aforementioned nuclear-threat shenanigans. And away we go…

The central treatise (without specific spoilers) of the plot is broken up into two major arcs, the threat of a stolen untraceable nuclear weapon and the investigation of the theft of a top-secret piece of new military neo-tech fabric designed to be an “invisibility cloak”. I felt like these two plots would have worked better as individual novels allowing the author to dig a deeper pit of intrigue, especially in the case of the missing cloaks. The version of Cloaked Deception that we do get felt overinflated in a way that the reader gets dragged through a myriad of sequences meant exclusively to prove how much of a “thinking man’s plotter” Zahn is, with a continuous treadmill of events showcasing how “the bad guy is always one step ahead!”. The escalation never felt rewarding and I felt like I was being pulled from one checkpoint to the next as the cat-and-mouse game went through the motions toward the inevitable conclusion.

One of the major aspects of this novel that went from very cool, to expected, to downright tedious, was that EVERY major character is hypercompetent to the point of it becoming a slog as it feels like less of an organic progression and more of a synthetic game of one-upmanship.

Have you ever read a book or watched a (horror or thriller) movie where the protagonists or antagonists do excessively stupid things and you cannot help but sigh or yell at the book/screen for them to be more competent to give you a more rewarding experience, as they bumble through the story? Well, Cloaked Deception gave me the exact OPPOSITE feeling, and it was, unfortunately, just as icky.

The obvious counterargument to the above assertion is that we are dealing with the very highest apex of espionage intelligence in Cloaked Deception, wherein the key players are the heads of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and the gosh darn President of the United States. The antagonists are also portrayed as the highest levels of marines-turned-terrorists under a highly decorated armed forces General. While factually true, the way Zahn navigates the resolution of the various points of intrigue in the book feels less like he’s trying to let the reader think ahead to decipher the twists and turns of the plot, and more like reading the latest Michale Bay over the top action blockbuster.

In a sea of named-but-utterly-interchangeable characters, one of the only interesting characters in the story, Private Investigator Adam Ross serves as the bridge between the two major arcs, and is your classic wrong-place-wrong-time reluctant but also hypercompetent hero (a cross between John McLane and Ethan Hunt). The other standout character is hypercompetent (see the pattern?) but severely socially-challenged analyst for the FBI/CIA whose entire role in the novel feels like driving the “good side” of the cat-and-mouse chase as she feeds the reader with mystery-solving whiz-kid solutions. The antagonists are a numbered set of faceless marines who are, yet again, so amazingly competent at what they do that their flawless execution of their General’s nefarious plan feels almost robotic. With no discernible personalities assigned to any of them, it is easy for us to easily lose track of who’s who and who’s doing what through most of the story.

The other biggest failing of Cloaked Deception is just how flimsy the primary motivation of the villain, which is extremely jarring when contrasted with their superior sense of executing said motivation.

The “evil for the greater good of a nation” is a trope done to death, and the villains in Cloaked Deception add no nuance to the trope making them nothing but moustache-twirling megalomaniacs with a paper-thin veneer of anything akin to an interesting character study.

As a side note, as an Indian, with India being among the key players of Cloaked Deception, I sincerely felt that Zahn did a terrible job of painting a convincing nuanced narrative around my countrymen, culture, and political climate. Without descending into something irredeemably racist, it borders on cartoonishly stereotypical much in the same vein of Russians being the standard villains of the post-Cold War Hollywood media, which then got traded for the post-9/11 culture of painting the vague “Middle East” as the new baddies.

It just feels lazy.

To sum up, Cloaked Deception is held back by moments of its self-importance in plot-execution while also having a weak underlying meta that will leave readers feeling exhausted and unrewarded as they plod through the minutiae of a tediously complicated story with interchangeable characters, culminating in an ending that feels wholly underwhelming, overly predictable, thereby cloaking its own deception!