Readers' rating:
Published Aug 2019
400 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
Better Call Saul meets Nineteen Eighty-Four in this first volume in an explosive legal thriller series set in the world of Tropic of Kansas - a finalist for the 2018 Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of the year.
Defeated in a devastating war with China and ravaged by climate change, America is on the brink of a bloody civil war. Seizing power after a controversial election, the ruling regime has begun cracking down on dissidents fighting the nation's slide toward dictatorship. For Donny Kimoe, chaos is good for business. He's a lawyer who makes his living defending enemies of the state.
His newest client, young filmmaker Xelina Rocafuerte, witnessed the murder of an opposition leader and is now accused of terrorism. To save her from the only sentence worse than death, Donny has to extract justice from a system that has abandoned the rule of law. That means breaking the rules—and risking the same fate as his clients.
When Donny bungles Xelina's initial hearing, he has only days to save the young woman from being transferred to a detention camp from which no one returns. His only chance of winning is to find the truth—a search that begins with the opposition leader's death and leads to a dark conspiracy reaching the highest echelons of power.
Now, Donny isn't just fighting for his client's life—he's battling for his own. But as the trial in the top secret court begins, Xelina's friends set into motion a revolutionary response that could destroy the case. And when another case unexpectedly collides with Xelina's, Donny uncovers even more devastating secrets, knowledge that will force him to choose between saving one client...or the future of the entire country.
"[An] intense near-future legal thriller...Fans of Tropic of Kansas will like this prequel even better, and it's very accessible to new readers." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"This one is fresh, intelligent, and emotional with a plot that envisions an alternate reality hard to dismiss as unreal. It's a legal thriller, with a big twist, stirring and imaginative, brimming with skullduggery, that will have you asking: is this possible?" - Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author
"A kind of madcap Texas Gothic dark comedy, as the Houston good ole boy network is displayed like a courtroom scene in an unpublished Hunter S Thompson novel...It moves rocketing along at a ferocious pace--and then it lingers, haunting you." - Cory Doctorow
"Rule of Capture is a taut, smart legal thriller set five minutes into the future in a dystopian post-war America that looks scarily plausible from the vantage point of 2019, and marks Brown as one of our most tuned-in science fiction writers." - Adrian McKinty, Edgar and Ned Kelly Award-winning author of The Chain and Rain Dogs
"Peel back the dystopian and science fiction layers of this fast moving and entertaining story, and what remains is a smart, taut legal thriller bound to keep readers turning pages deep into the night." - Robert Bailey, bestselling author of the McMurtrie & Drake legal thriller series
This information about Rule of Capture was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Christopher Brown's debut novel Tropic of Kansas was a finalist for the Campbell Award for best science fiction novel of 2018, and he was a World Fantasy Award nominee for the anthology Three Messages and a Warning. His short fiction and criticism has appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, including MIT Technology Review, LitHub, Tor.com and The Baffler. He lives in Austin, Texas, where he also practices law.
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