Carpe Noir - SF / Fantasy Thriller
Caber McMasters is a quantum physicist caged in a dystopian surveillance state where social credit scores and compliance reign supreme. Six months after his brother Branson’s disappearance during a failed experiment involving Element 115—the energy source behind a secret project funded by a shadow government agency—Caber is taken off the team. All he has left is grief and an unsolvable puzzle encoded in a luxury watch. When faceless entities called Suits attack, Caber is hurled into a world far darker than the one he grew numb to—a world where his brother’s cryptic clues are a breadcrumb trail leading him to discover an imminent invasion from another dimension. With the help of Dani Álvarez—colleague and love interest harboring a secret about Branson’s disappearance—Caber must lead a desperate heist into the heart of Project Chronos before the Summer Solstice.
For Fans who like:
Science Fiction served with magic
Blistering paced thrillers
Character driven plot, featuring a diverse ensemble of 43 memorable characters
Multi-POV braided structures - the finale where all characters collide is nuclear
Genre mashups
A message from A.G. Batía.
For those who read Carpe Noir:
I wanted to write a story where I could take all of my favorite elements of great stories and mash them together into something unique yet thematically coherent: DaVinci code puzzle solving, visceral MMA-style action sequences, a unique magic system grounded in science, weaving modern conspiracy and ancient mysticism, quantum physics and interdimensional time travel. I wanted evocative world-building, memorable characters, romance, adventure, mystery— all in one place. In one story. And there had to be at least one dragon.
I succeeded in writing a novel that shares aspects of many genres and is stitched together by story that explores many complex themes, though none so much as Time. The following was written as a message to my readers, intended to be included in the book. It may or may not end up there, so this is for you:
Time, it seems, is an odd sort of thing. A construct based on an agreed upon set of principles to measure and communicate the space upon which existence takes place. Space, as it turns out, is an equally puzzling phenomenon. A thing upon which we anticipate and predict, but at the quantum level, can evaporate its own relevance in outlandish contradictions and symbolic gesticulations of a knowing that exceeds us yet precedes us at the same time. It is not ‘what if’ or ‘once upon a time,’ all of everything simply exists, right now. ‘Now’... There it is again, Time... but can the rules we have so carefully constructed be bent? What is the tensile strength of our argument for time and space as we think we know it? Some argue it is a figment of our imagination, a painting upon which to share our experience with others. Others...now there is another funny notion. How you do you, my dear, beloved reader, suppose this story goes?