The first volume in a legal thriller series set in the world of Tropic of Kansas. Donny Kimoe, a former prosecutor and corporate attorney exiled to pro bono cases, is the public defender for accused terrorists whose crimes are trying to reform a broken America that has suffered the loss of Hawaii to a victorious China.
Rule of Capture is the first in a planned series of legal thrillers, and if this first installment is any indication, I will buy the others the day they appear on shelves, mute my phone, and cancel all appointments for the next couple of days. Rule of Capture is part 1984, part Brave New World, part ripped from the Mueller report, though it transcends the current occupant of the White House. Brown has taken all the dissonant noise and distilled it, then extrapolated to a possible logical endpoint ... Rule of Capture is also very funny ... Brown’s use of language is clever and smart, while instances of purple prose and pedantic speeches, which would be so easy to do given the material, are few ... Brown grabs us with the first sentence ... And he never lets go, intricately plotting and carefully crafting a just-one-more-chapter page-turner about a future that is all too plausible
...Rule of Capture... is set in the same world as the earlier novel but at the other end of the social spectrum, in Washington among the lawyers and the politicians. The threat is still the same: an overbearing security state, established in response to the U.S. having lost the satellite war in near-space amid rising Chinese domination ... Rule of Capture is not just sci-fi, it’s also a legal thriller. Its author is himself a lawyer, just like John Grisham, and he has a grip on detail that full-time sci-fi authors can’t match.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and this intense near-future legal thriller tries to find solace in that final tenth ... Interpersonal drama fuels the story as much as legal maneuvering, and Brown keeps tight control of his narrative even as this alternate America slips its gears. Fans of Tropic of Kansas will like this prequel even better, and it’s very accessible to new readers.
