I’m delighted to share my review of Always Adam by Mark Brumby. This is part of the damppebbles blog tour, so be sure to check out all the other reviewers’ thoughts, too.
Always Adam by Mark Brumby
Previously released in 2013 as Payback
Genre: techno-thriller
London-based financial journalist Spencer Beck is obsessed with billionaire biotech prodigy, Adam Reid, orphaned in his mid-teens when his parents died in a tragic murder-suicide in New York City.
A shadowy informant with MI5 connections promises Beck unfettered access to the mysterious Reid and introduces him to Daniel Flanagan, a retired Big Apple detective who investigated the deaths of Adam’s mother and father.
Spencer’s initial scepticism, fed by the suspicions of the former police officer, turns to excitement when Reid reveals the truth about himself and his altruistic ambitions to protect society from a deadly virus with a powerful vaccine he’s developed.
But when Beck’s entire world starts to implode, he discovers Reid harbours a vendetta that, left unchecked, threatens not only his survival but that of an entire species. (from blurb)
My thoughts
Take one part brilliant-scientist-gone-rogue, one part revenge-thriller, and one part snarky-narrator-with-everything-to-lose, mix them together, and you’ll get Always Adam.
From the start, I loved the writer’s voice. Spencer Beck’s voice reminds me of a noir antihero combined with a tinge of Tom Sawyer: simultaneously cynical and guileless, skeptical and eager.
By the end of the first chapter, I was completely hooked, reeled in, and ready to eat or be eaten by this story. It ate my plans for the day, that’s for certain. I couldn’t stop reading.
Things keep getting worse and worse for Spencer. First he isn’t on the guest list to Adam’s party (though the mysterious MI5-connected Simon assured him that he was). Adam’s nasty valet damages his Porsche. Later he finds the car stolen and dumped outside the pub where he had a pint or two. Then he winds up in jail overnight for DUI. And Simon keeps breaking into his apartment to leave things–a burner phone, tickets, whatever he needs to investigate Adam Reid. Each time this happens, the creepy-factor increases, and it’s unnerving for both Spencer and the reader. The guy can’t get a break. He seems to be at the mercy of an all-powerful person, but who is Simon?
And then ex-cop Daniel Flanagan arrives. Flanagan recounts the story of Adam’s parents’ murder-suicide. It was a gruesome scene. The forensic details about the murder ring true to me, though I’m not an expert. Flanagan is just as fascinating a character as Spencer. In some ways, he appears to be the cliched ex-cop: alone, bitter, haunted by what he did or left undone on this case. But Brumby gives this character a good deal of depth, too.
Spencer isn’t certain he can trust the words of an embittered ex-cop with a tainted record. But if what Flanagan says about Adam Reid is true, it’s a huge story. A career-making story–or a career-ending one. Spencer, badly in need of a breakthrough in his journalistic career, can’t resist the siren call of the story. He has to investigate. If that means Flanagan tags along, so be it. I enjoyed watching them learning to trust each other.
Brumby continually raises the stakes, creating a situation that the journalist and ex-cop find increasingly difficult to navigate. Questions pile up. The more Spencer investigates, the closer he comes to Adam Reid. Adam has a cult-like following among his investors. In their eyes, he can do no wrong. It’s simultaneously amusing and alarming to watch Spencer try to fake it until he makes it. Only this is a deadly game, and faking it might mean he doesn’t make it.
The story races forward, particularly after Spencer arrives in New York City. Even when the “action” is mostly dialogue, Brumby uses the combination of setting (an eerily-deserted American Museum of Natural History), characters, and dialogue to heighten the tension to an almost unbearable level. The denouement is a bit ambiguous, though. Spencer and the reader never receive answers to every question.
All the same, it’s a fitting end. Brumby forces us to think about how humans try to advance their world through science and forces us to grapple with the questions for ourselves. Always Adam is a thought-provoking thriller that shows the consequences and costs of these scientific achievements. I heartily recommend this book to anyone who likes techno-thrillers.
Note: I received a complimentary copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I was not required to write a positive review. All opinions are my own.
Buy links:
Purchase Links:
Amazon UK: https://amzn.to/3koeGq4
Amazon US: https://amzn.to/3lcGFKp
Social Media Links for Boomslang Books:
Website: https://boomslangbooks.org/
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Read more reviews of Always Adam
About Mark Brumby
About Mark Brumby:
A Cambridge economics graduate, Mark Brumby is a vastly experience financial analyst and owner of Langton Capital, an FCA-regulated advisory company specialising in the hospitality and leisure sectors. He is a partner in the Imbiba Partnership, which invests in pub, bar and restaurant start-ups.
Mark wrote Always Adam (originally published as Payback) in 2013. Boomslang is republishing the book in November 2020 as it deserves to reach a wider audience in the current pandemic climate.
“Covid-19 has brought home not just the fragility of human life but the power of vaccines. Very shortly, we hope, a vaccine could physically alter the cell structure of three or four billion people and protect the same number again via herd immunity. But what if a vaccine were misused?”
“In some ways the world has changed but in many ways it remains the same. The ‘facts’ re our existence have not and will not change. But the events of the last few months have brought home the truth that we are only animals and that we are almost as much at risk from novel diseases with high R ratios and significant mortality rates as we have ever been.”
“I tried to take a step back and look at how we got here & what we’re doing. That sounds deep but some 99% of species that have ever existed are extinct, so what makes us so special?”
“Indeed, we’ve very nearly joined the list of ‘used-to-be’ species list on several occasions. Anthropologists believe that the human population at times in our history fell to a total of less than 10,000 individuals worldwide. You could fit them all in a small football ground and it’s more than a 99.99% reduction on the number of people around today.”
“As an author, Covid-19 has moved the goalposts a little. It has made the unbelievable a little more believable. A pandemic, until December of last year was, literally, a fiction.”
Mark Brumby is married with five children and commutes between London and his home in York.
Social Media:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/AdamGregorReid
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ASpencerBeck