Curse the Day by Judith O’Reilly: A Technothriller/Conspiracy Novel filled with Action (and some low tech solutions)

Curse the Day by Judith O’Reilly Series: Michael North, #2 Kindle Edition, 331 pg. Head of Zeus, 2020 Read: August 24-25, 2020 Grab a copy from your local indie bookstore!

He wanted to meet whoever had hacked that car. Then he wanted to punch them in the face. Because someone had tried to kill him and the innocent woman alongside him. And call him old- fashioned, but that made him mad. And an angry Michael North was someone who might just kill someone right back.

What’s Curse the Day About?

Killing State‘s ending pretty much broke Michael North*. When the book opens, he’s trying to drink and gamble himself into oblivious rather than dealing with the emotional fallout.

* which is ironic, because the rest of the book was pretty much about him coming back to life.

And then an old acquaintance from MI-6 shows up with a job. His niece is an ethicist married to one of the most innovative computer scientists around, who is on the verge of a major announcement in the development of AI. But someone is trying to interfere with that announcement, and have tried to kill his niece. He wants North to sober up and protect her. To guarantee his cooperation, he’s arranged for Fang’s mother to be arrested and is threatening to deport her and send her back to China. It’s this, and only this, that compels North to action.

Fang’s waiting for him—and is full of less than supportive things to say about his recent activity, but she’s more than ready to help him. Not just for her mother’s sake. Also, not just because this kind of AI is the stuff she dreams of. Despite their brief acquaintance, she really likes North and wants to help.

Narrowing down the source of the threat is difficult—there’s some industrial espionage afoot, some not very covert efforts by Chinese representatives to gain control of the technology, and some British military types heavily invested, too. One of the adversaries North faces off with is straight out of a Bond movie, while the others are more…down to Earth (at least by the standards contemporary thrillers). I’m not sure which I prefer—I just like to know that against North, both types of adversary have their work cut out for them.

It’s clear what North will do to whoever’s behind the attacks, the question is, what will it take for him to figure out the responsible parties.

So, what did I think about Curse the Day?

Life wasn’t grey– it was black and white, there was good and there was evil, and he knew how far he was prepared to go for the sake of the good.

I have a hard time not recommending a book with such moral clarity (even if the protagonist who holds that clarity needs some work on how to live out that morality).

I’ve read entire books that managed to have less tension than the prologue to this novel, and it was enough to instantly get me engaged and invested in the outcome.

But after that, I think the novel didn’t grab me as much as I wanted it to. Killing State was, in many ways, about North casting off the restraints that held him back (professionally, emotionally, mentally), and Curse the Day didn’t have much of that. At least a couple of times, North compares Esme and Honor (the woman he was protecting in Killing State)—even seems to realize that he’s trying to make Esme into a version of Honor, to react to her the same way. And it just doesn’t work for him—or me—she’s not Honor, as much as he might want her to be. Possibly in Book 3 he won’t be looking for another Honor and will be able to focus on the tasks at hand, or come up with a new way to emotionally invest.

This didn’t work for me the way that Killing State did, but I’m still coming back for more, and fully expect O’Reilly to knock my socks off again, even if she didn’t this time out. But it was a clever story, and I particularly liked spending time with Fang (and look forward to seeing what trouble she gets into with her new toy).

Curse the Day‘s biggest problem was that it wasn’t Killing State and if I read this one first, I probably would’ve enjoyed it more. It was tense, well-paced, with just the right number of twists and unexpected developments. Everything a thriller needs, and because of that, I have no problem encouraging you to read it. You’ll probably like it more than I did. And even if you don’t, you’ll still have a pretty fun time.

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