Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio for Readers' Favorite

In J. Luke Bennecke’s Blackout, the US president is assassinated via a wave of drone strikes to pave the way for a coup, and civil engineer Jake Bendel is thrust into a national nightmare, looking for answers and working hard to stop a complete blackout. Tracy Ciacchella is the leader of the New3 Cabal and is the architect of the chaos; she intends to collapse the US power grid using miniature EMP “black bricks” and fifty thousand kamikaze drones. She wants to make the country defenseless. Now, Jake must navigate a compromised White House, face the mystery surrounding the death of his wife, and deal with his own hacked Sûr System. In this terrifyingly plausible world, room-temperature superconductors and off-the-shelf quadcopters are powerful weapons, and the aging technology becomes the Achilles’ heel of the most powerful country in the world.

The pacing is breathless, and J. Luke Bennecke cleverly uses the split-countdown structure toward the 5:30 and 6:00 a.m. attacks to leave no room for respite. The tension mounts as Jake’s personal desperation grows when he discovers that his supposedly dead wife, Cynthia, might still be alive and a hostage at the Stonewall facility, and as the grid collapse becomes imminent. Blackout is a propulsive thriller delivered in an engaging narrative voice, with Jake’s clear perspective pitched against Tracy’s chilling sociopathic monologues. This thriller thrives on detailed descriptions (from the black brick EMP reverse-engineered to an AI quantum computer that predicts possibilities), streams of consciousness, sparkling dialogue, and tense scenes. The worldbuilding is alarmingly authentic, and fans of The Terminal List by Jack Carr and The President Is Missing by James Patterson and Bill Clinton will find the same blend of ticking-clock action and political conspiracy here.