The novel tells the story of Ash Sanders, a former CIA soldier who wakes up next to his dead wife and becomes the prime suspect in her murder. A sleep psychologist tries to help him with his violent nightmares, and Ash begins to remember fragments of memories buried deep in his subconscious. He soon discovers that he was part of a government program that manipulated the subconscious and dreams of individuals to create a team of assassins. The plot revolves around the recovery of the algorithm used to program these individuals, which was stolen and concealed within the minds of the operatives. The book explores themes of government power, reality, and control.

I received this book from the authors (Dr. MIchael Breus and Sean Platt), their publishing company (Starling and Stone) and the fine folks at NetGalley.com in return for an honest review.

This technothriller starts out reading like a book detailing some of the horrors that have been felt by the brave men and women who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan as a former soldier details some of the sleep troubles that he has faced since returning home.

Than the novel does an about face as we learn that he is actually a veteran of the CIA who is part of a select program, called the Bespokery, where this arm of the intelligence community has utilized the Wurtzman Principle to be able to affect the subconscious and dreams of individuals to create an army of assassins to perform "wet work" in countries around the world. Based upon this plot, I draw parallels between this novel and The Manchurian Candidate by Richard Condon (1959).

The plot of the book deals with the senior members of The Bespokery as they try to recover the algorithm, known as The Protocol, that was taken from their group and hidden within the minds of one of five operatives (with four false leads) to try to take the power from this organization.

The plot is complex and deep and nothing is at is seems. I would give this book a solid four stars out of five and would would highly recommend it fans of technothrillers by writers such as Michael Crichton and Dan Brown.

As with all my literary ramblings, this is just my five cents worth.

This is super scary and dark, dark, dark! All the more so because it seemed so possible. The authors included enough detail to make the case utterly credible and all the more terrifying because of it.