Review

If you missed the recent, rocketing surges of AI stocks such as Nvidia or Advanced Micro Devices, you might be a bit late for the party. But not so Mark Greaney. Greaney’s 13th Gray Man novel, “The Chaos Agent” (Berkley), dropped just as things were heating up on Wall Street in late February with a thriller that couldn’t be more prescient.

With the premise of a tech company and its mastermind billionaire building on artificial intelligence platforms to create lethal autonomous weapons — complete with rocket-launching cyber watchdogs, humanoids and other artifices of destruction — the denouement was always going to be a HAL 9000-esque brain threatening to gain sentience.

Like the dozen Gray Man novels before — Court Gentry is the Gray Man, a covert freelance operative once trained by the CIA whose modus operandi falls somewhere between shades of white and black — Greaney handles all of this masterfully, moving us around the underworld with a … love interest (check) … best friend (check) … master nemesis (check) and … national arch enemy (check), in a cinematic scope that feels all too real.

The author is known for getting the details just right — guns in hand are real-world guns, boots on the ground are real-world boots — so the wonder isn’t that the novel brings us to today’s near-precipice of man versus machine, but how quickly we’re actually getting there. So quickly, in fact, that in early March, Vatican News published this story: “Holy See urges ethical oversight of lethal autonomous weapons” on the same day that the Wall Street Journal published the story, “The Pentagon’s Plan for More Ambitious, Affordable Jet Fighters: AI Pilots.”

Given that novels are a year or longer in production before publication, and written even earlier, now, that’s prescient.

Roundup

Other new titles worth your time (and dollars) this month conveniently adhere to a theme (and you won’t need ChatGPT to help figure out what that is).

“Almost Surely Dead” (Mindy’s Book Studio) by Amina Akhtar is part stalker, part ghost story and all psychological thriller. Akhtar is the author of the best-selling novel “Kismet,” and here offers a story about an extraordinary life that turns into a true crime podcast.

“The Lady in Glass and Other Stories” (Ace) by Anne Bishop collects shorter works set in the author’s most cherished, fantastical worlds, transporting us over a 25-year career of dark fantasy.

“A Haunting in the Arctic” (Berkley paperback) by C.J. Cooke is a dual timeline story with the main thread taking place after an early 20th century, haunting attack aboard the whaling ship Ormen. The wreck washes up a century later on the remote coast of Iceland, bringing to the present a dark past of cruelty and murder.

“Ghost Island” (Berkley) is Max Seeck’s fourth book in Ghosts of the Past, a series that has been building suspense and thrills since the author’s 2020 U.S. debut, “The Witch Hunter.” An atmospheric mystery, the novel is a driving Nordic procedural from the first Finnish author in seven decades to make the New York Times bestseller list.

Reveal

Some the titles I’ll be working on for next in “Review, roundup, reveal and rewind,” with the books’ scheduled publication dates, include:

“Hello, Alabama”(Arcadia) by Martha Day Zschock, March 4.

“The Unquiet Bones” (Montlake) by Loreth Anne White, March 5.

“I am Rome: A novel of Julius Caesar” (Ballantine Books) by Santiago Posteguillo, March 5.

“Murder Road” (Berkley) by Simone St. James, March 5.

“The Luminous Life of Lucy Landry” (Holiday House) by Anna Rose Johnson, March 5.

“The #1 Lawyer” (Little, Brown and Company) by James Patterson and Nancy Allen, March 18.

“Lilith” (Blackstone) by Eric Rickstad, March 19.

And, watch for a couple of interviews that are also scheduled for March, including “After Annie” (Random House) by Anna Quindlen and “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood” (Montag Press) by Bradley Sides.

Rewind

Finally, in case you missed a few notable titles from earlier in the year:

“Unbound” (Blackstone) by Christy Healy is a tale of betrayal and unrequited romance, with the author bringing Celtic myths into a gender-bent reimagining of “Beauty and the Beast.”

“The Devil’s Daughter” (Blackstone) by Gordon Greisman is solid PI noir and gets a screenwriter’s touch — the author earned an Emmy Award nomination for his NBC mini-series “The Drug Wars: In the Belly of the Beast.” Tempering period characters (Thelonious Monk, Marlon Brando) with private investigator Jack Coffey’s search for the daughter of an uptown financier presents a dark story about redemption.

“Masters of the Air” (Blackstone) by Donald Miller isn’t a new book, but it gets a new audio treatment with the addition of narration by veteran raconteur Joe Barrett. Not just for the World War II aficionado, you can find a visual complement to the story with a recently launched Apple TV+ series by the same name.