The Courier

A motorcycle courier is caught up in a web of corporate espionage in this gritty near-future science fiction thriller, the first in the San Angeles series. In the West Coast megalopolis of San Angeles, which stretches from San Diego to San Francisco, 16-year-old orphan Kris Ballard makes her meager living delivering business correspondence too sensitive to risk on the Internet. A late-day delivery brings her to the office of a freshly murdered corpse and puts her in the crosshairs of a desperate megacorporation and its crack assassin. Now Kris is on the run, and her only ally is an anticorporate organization with its own agenda. The setting, with its warring megacorporations and a government under corporate control, will be familiar to old-school cyberpunk fans. The story moves in fits and starts, with headlong chases interrupted by expository scenes and point-of-view shifts that do more to set up later series events than support Kris’s plot line. Despite the novel’s flaws, Brandt’s debut offers intriguing possibilities for later books in the series. Agent: Sara Megibow, KT Literary. (Mar.)