The heist of hollow London

Tense, twisty, and thoughtful, this futuristic heist tale from Robson (Drunk on All Your Strange New Words) sets an impressive thrill ride against the backdrop of a crumbling and corrupt dystopia. In the future, corporations create clones of executives intended to serve as "spare parts" should the need arise. To pay back the cost of their creation, these "mades" are indentured in myriad positions within their companies. When one of the world's largest corporations, Oakseed, unexpectedly goes bust, all of its assets are scheduled for decommission, destruction, or sale. Mia Ostrander, a former developer for Oakseed, buys a handful of the company's mades, including brand ambassador Arlo, security officer Nadi, and IT specialist Loren, and presents them with a bold plan: to steal a digital Coyne, "a type of anonymized, untraceable data storage device" worth $80 million, from a soon-to-be-decommissioned facility. If they succeed, they'll all be able to buy their freedom. But security is tight, someone's always watching, and that much money is enough to tempt anyone. This unlikely crew of clones will risk everything and, in the process, discover what they're truly made of. Explorations of identity, commodification, and exploitation run throughout the narrative, which toggles between the crew's multiple perspectives as they scheme their way toward victory. This works on every level. (Sept.)

In Robson's (Drunk on All Your Strange New Words) dystopian sci-fi caper, a too-big-to-fail megacorporation on a future Earth is collapsing catastrophically but is chaotically ripe for one last big score. That's the story told to five of the megacorp clone workers, who are being sold to settle its debts. Arlo, Drienne, and their friends have been selected to make the heist and are promised freedom and citizenship in return for carrying out a plan that is too convoluted to make sense and too good to be true. They have no real choices, and they know they're being conned. However, in a world where they are disposable, they have a chance to scam the scammers this time. They just need to stick to their own plan instead of the one they've been programmed to follow. VERDICT Readers who love a good caper story or a sci-fi mystery will be thrilled with this plot/counterplot/con game in which the underdogs have a chance to come out on top, while those who enjoy post-climate-apocalypse stories, such as Premee Mohamed's The Annual Migration of Clouds or Alix E. Harrow's "The Knight and the Butcherbird," will get caught up in Robson's fascinating interpretation of a world gone very, very wrong.--Marlene Harris