In Zero Sum Game, S.L. Huang introduces readers to Cas Russell--an expert in the purposefully vague field of "retrieval"--who finds her skills tested after a rescue mission brings her to the attention of a vast and dangerous conspiracy. Russell is no easy target, capable of seemingly impossible physical feats and unerring marksmanship that enables her to kill packs of goons with ease. Rather than super-strength or heightened reflexes, she relies on her uncanny facility for math: "The dark-suited men became points in motion, my brain extrapolating from the little I could see and hear, assigning probabilities and translating to expected values." Russell is so good at math that she can take out perimeter guards with a handful of rocks:"I scooped up a few, my hands instantly reading their masses. Projectile motion: my height, their heights, the acceleration of gravity, and a quick correction for air resistance--and then pick the right initial velocity so that the deceleration of such a mass against a human skull would provide the correct force to drop a grown man.
One, two, three. The guards tumbled into well-armed heaps on the ground."
Zero Sum Game is a thriller with light science fiction elements, reminiscent of Max Barry's Lexicon. Huang's protagonist is hard-nosed to an extreme: the closest thing she has to a friend is another murderously talented killer with a penchant for sadism and few recognizable emotions. The novel pushes a relentless pace, with countless well-executed action scenes and an impressive body count. The only force that can stand in Russell's way for long is an elusive organization named Pithica. Russell must question her own mind as she finds evidence of Pithica's eerie ability to manipulate thoughts.
In the process of hunting down the organization, Russell is forced to create a few new human attachments, including one to a relatively moral PI named Arthur, who compels her to examine the frightening ease with which she takes life. At one point, she muses: "I could have killed him in less than half a second, but that didn't help at all. In fact, a niggling voice in the back of my head reminded me that such an attitude was what he was taking issue with in the first place." Meanwhile, Russell's shark-like need to maintain constant forward motion--without a case to focus on, her math-obsessed brain is overwhelmed by numbers in a "teeming, boiling mass"--plunges her into constant conflict with Pithica and its agents.
Zero Sum Game's pleasures lie in the protagonist's repeated ability to extricate herself from seemingly impossible predicaments, whipping up math-based solutions to gunfights on the fly. In one memorable scene, Russell makes a number of small adjustments, one involving an umbrella, that allow her to eavesdrop on a distant conversation. How? It involves sound waves and, of course, math. In Cas Russell, Huang has created a protagonist with a distinctive hook. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill, N.C.
Shelf Talker: Zero Sum Game is a thriller with light SF elements that introduces us to Cas Russell, an expert in retrieval and seemingly impossible gunplay thanks to her preternatural grasp of math.