Committal

Cooper’s high-tech debut thriller offers an electrifying premise and a series of wildly imaginative twists, but drowns them in a sea of confounding exposition. Sadistic tycoon Abner Ruggles orders a lobotomy on Luci, his 13-year-old daughter, who suffered brain damage during birth. The procedure turns Luci into a psychopathic engineering genius. As an adult, Luci heads up Olympia Navigation, and, with her loyal assistant Jasper, creates Searchlight, the most advanced global positioning system the world has ever seen. But Luci secretly encodes a virus into the program that will render sterile all human males who use it. Meanwhile, Luci’s long-lost twin brother, Tokker, raised on a farm in Oklahoma by his Aunt Esther, who is really a secret operative, is recruited by Beacon, Searchlight’s precursor, to save mankind by locating and dismantling the three satellites necessary to launch Searchlight. While moments of humor lighten the mood, the bloated, nonchronological exposition and bizarre cameos from real world celebrities Viggo Mortensen and Tilda Swinton, encumber this struggling thriller. The tragic figure of Luci goes underexplored while flashbacks overpower present-day action and dialogue to the point that readers will spend too much time untangling the timeline to be swept away by the many clever twists. Though Cooper shows promise, this first outing disappoints. (Sept.)