Modern technology presents a serious problem for a thriller writer. Once characters can call or text one another, a whole portfolio of suspense-building gimmicks - like the high-speed race across town - just stop working. For years, thriller writers contrived implausible - but narratively convenient - ways to go on using these tropes. Think of the shopworn "damn, my phone is out of battery/range just when I need it the most":

youtube.com/watch?v=XIZVcRccCx…

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No Signal (and other cellular drama)

A montage of the most overused horror-cinema plot device, post-2000.

^YouTube

When that fails, often writers just lean into the "idiot plot" - a plot that only works because the characters are acting like idiots:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot_pl…

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But even as technology was sawing a hole in the suspense writer's bag of tricks, shrewd suspense writers were cooking up a whole new menu of clever ways to build suspense in ways that turn on the limitations and capabilities of technology. One pioneer of this was Iain M Banks (RIP), whose 2003 novel *Dead Air* was jammed with wildly ingenious ways to use cellphones to raise the stakes and heighten the tension:

web.archive.org/web/2003030207…

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This is "techno-realism" at its best. It's my favorite mode of storytelling, the thing I lean into with my *Little Brother* and *Martin Hench* books - stories that treat the things that technology can and can't do as features, not bugs.

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Rather than having the hacker "crack the mainframe's cryptography in 20 minutes when everyone swears it can't be done in less than 25," the techno-realist introduces something gnarlier, like a supply-chain attack that inserts a back-door, or a hardware keylogger, or a Remote Access Trojan.

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Back to Roque's debut novel: it's a teen murder mystery told in the most technorealist way. Cia's best friend Alice has been trying to find her missing boyfriend for months, and in her investigation, she's discovered their small town's dark secret - a string of disappearances, deaths and fires that are the hidden backdrop to the town's out-of-control addiction problem.

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Alice has something to tell Cia, something about the fire that orphaned her and cost her one leg when she was only five years old, but Cia refuses to hear it. Instead, they have a blazing fight, and part ways. It's the last time Cia and Alice ever see each other: that night, Alice kills herself.

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Or does she? Cia is convinced that Alice has been murdered, and that her murder is connected to the drug- and death-epidemic that's ravaging their town. As Cia and her friends seek to discover the town's secret - and the identity of Alice's killer - we're dragged into an intense, gripping murder mystery/conspiracy story that is full of surprises and reversals, each more fiendishly clever than the last.

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But as good as the storytelling, the characterization and the mystery are, Roque's clever technological gambits are even better. This book is a master-class in how a murder mystery can work in the age of social media and ubiquitous mobile devices. It's the first volume in a trilogy and it ends on a hell of a cliff-hanger, too.

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I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel *The Bezzle*! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 17) in CHICAGO, then Torino (Apr 21), Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/nar…

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