Deep Fake is a mind-churning jaw-dropping mixture of Cold War era thrillers and cutthroat political narratives that serve as meaningful and thoughtful commentaries about the world we find ourselves in today. Ward Larsen stretches out to a different sort of thriller than his David Slaton action-packed adventures and proves that he has both the emotional and intellectual intelligence to tackle different sub genres within the thrillerverse.
When a junior congressman, Bryce Ridgeway, puts his life at risk to stop a suicide bomber, he’s immediately regaled as a public hero and jettisoned off to the political races for a shot at the presidency. The moments of relief and celebration for the Ridgeway family start falling apart when Sarah Ridgeway notices peculiarities in her husband’s demeanor. She reaches out to a friend, a research scientist, whose groundbreaking work opens the door for unsettling revelations about an audaciously horrific conspiracy. Is the man in the spotlight truly her husband?
There’s a delicate balance between narratives that are wonderfully delightful but ridiculously impossible and those that seem eerily probable. Ward Larsen walks the pitch perfect line in a scary armament of modern technology that’s not only in use today but the implications of which are still not feared widely by society at large. Larsen’s grasp on up-and-coming technology is commendable and perhaps best describes the threat posed by unregulated technology in both politics and espionage when those who are relentless in their pursuit of a bold idea get their hands on something so powerful and damaging to a world that basically runs on 0’s and 1’s.
While grappling with the scary modern-day voodoo that is technology, Larsen doesn’t lose sight of the effects of such threats on the very human characters that are first and foremost in the narrative. Sarah’s dilemma of discovering the dark side about her “husband” feels so genuine that it crosses over into unsettling territory even for a reader who knows this isn’t actually happening. Her unofficial investigation with her best friend leads her down a turmoil path that rivets and twists like a formula-one race track. You don’t get a moment of breather as Ward Larsen takes you on a roller coaster of a thriller.
Deep Fake is as good as it gets for smart political thrillers that keep you engrossed in the pages and offer a fresh narrative and perspective. There’s a great aerial combat sequence in the climax that stands out as one of the most intense finales I have read so far. Leave it to Ward Larsen to deliver nail-biting action on both the ground and in the air.
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