When the creator of a powerful brain-implant technology is found murdered, a telepath is brought in to find answers in Fullilove’s SF novel.

The year is 2052 and brain-chip implants have become an unspoken requirement in society. Those made by NeuralStent are the best of the best…and only available to the wealthy. Jenny Sixa, a psychic whose “cruel talent” is the ability to see the last thoughts of murder victims in order to discover who killed them, encounters the most baffling case of her career when the LAPD’s Derrick Trent calls her in to discover who murdered NeuralStent’s founder, billionaire Ellen Pompeii. Sixa scorns NeuralStent’s inaccessibility to the nonwealthy people living in the “Zone,” which essentially forces them to gamble their lives with cheap knockoffs because “without chips, people can’t work, can’t compete in a society that demands the ability to access and manipulate information and equipment in a way that requires augmentation.” Still, she takes the case—but to her horror, Sixa quickly discovers that she can’t find anything in Pompeii’s final thoughts. The police rush to find someone to blame—in this case, a young man named Jamal Smith who had previously served time in jail—but Sixa isn’t convinced they have the right guy. As she and Trent dig deeper, they begin to peel back the layers of a dark underworld full of illegal chip augmentations, gluttonous investors, and a research discovery that might just bring down the entire brain-implant system. Meanwhile, bodies continue piling up—all of which have that odd blankness as their last memory that Sixa can’t crack—and Smith’s execution day looms as the investigative duo rapidly runs out of time.

Fullilove has crafted a thrilling futuristic tale that never shies away from taking aim at soulless corporations and their insatiable desire for profits: “A human life. Coin of the realm for the greedy and the merciless.” Some of the novel’s themes will likely prove familiar to those well versed in the SF canon; fans of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) will no doubt see some similarities in this largely dystopic world where humans with brain-chip implants have become vastly preferable to the “artificials” (androids) who had previously dominated the workforce and are now “engineered with limited life spans.” Some of the explanations of the brain-chip technology can become a bit long-winded, but Fullilove largely keeps the pace brisk with realistic dialogue and a keen balance between detective-type mystery and adrenaline-fueled action. The real standout, however, is Sixa herself. Whip-smart and utterly compelling, she proves over and over again to be a no-nonsense (and amusingly foul-mouthed) champion of the common people. Many readers will likely find her scathing remarks about the ability of privilege and wealth to buy some semblance of justice eerily relevant: “LAPD has got indifference down to a science, with an algorithm that calculates how fucked you are down to a decimal point…Not to mention the poor slobs in the Zone, because money can’t buy justice in the Zone, detective, it can only buy you scapegoats.” These themes of class, technology vs. morality, and social responsibility come appealingly wrapped in a fun and surprising futuristic odyssey.

A truly unique protagonist fuels plenty of action and intrigue in this smart and twisty SF thriller.