Robert Ludlum's The Utopia Experiment: A Covert-One Novel

The 10th installment in this thriller series about a super-secret government agency is easily the best yet. Mills, who authored the eighth entry, The Ares Decision, succeeds in melding science-fiction, espionage, and action to create an intelligent page-turner. Covert-One operative Lieutenant Colonel Jon Smith, a microbiologist, is on hand in Las Vegas when tech genius Christian Dresner unveils Merge, a sort of Google Glass on steroids that has extraordinary military potential. Merge links directly to the wearer's brain, but, more disturbingly, it uses all the online data in can get to code the people the wearer observes as either good or bad. To very few readers' surprise, Dresner's motives in creating Merge-and offering the US exclusive rights to the military application-aren't pure, setting up another opportunity for Smith and his allies to save the day. Mills's projections of where current technology and the future of privacy may be heading are both chilling and plausible. (Apr.)