Dare To Know Review

Dark Matter meets Annihilation in this mind-bending and emotional speculative thriller set in a world where the exact moment of your death can be predicted–for a price.

Our narrator is the most talented salesman at Dare to Know, a prestigious and enigmatic company in the death-prediction business. While he has mastered the art of death, the rest of his life is an abject failure. Divorced, estranged from his sons, and broke, he's driven to violate the cardinal rule of his business by forecasting his own death day. The problem: apparently he died 23 minutes ago.

The only person who can confirm his prediction is Julia, the woman he loved and lost during his rise up the ranks of Dare to Know. As he travels across the country to see her, our narrator is forced to confront his past, the choices he's made, and the terrifying truth about the company he works for--and his role there.

Highly ambitious and totally immersive, this adrenaline-fueled thriller explores the destructive power of knowledge and collapses the boundaries between reality, myth, and conspiracy as it races toward its stunning conclusion.

General Impressions

'Dare To Know' has such an interesting premise that I just dove right in and for most of the book I did not regret it.

When we meet our narrator he is a middle-aged employee fighting for every commission and thinking about the hay day of his employment when he was one out of a handful of men (and one woman) that could understand and do the math to predict someone's death date.

Most of the book is told through flashbacks, from our narrator's childhood, to teen years, to college years where he meets Julia and makes all the decisions that ultimately lead him to the present. I never flew through a book where I despised the narrator as much as this. He is a bad partner, employee, husband and father but of course, in his head, he cannot comprehend how come he is not as successful as some of his former colleagues when for all his life he was always advanced by his intelligence and protected by his privilege.

Conclusions

I was thoroughly enjoying this book until the last 50 pages or so where it all descended into more magic than science and ultimately I did not even understand the ending, but even then I continue to have liked the premise and the story up until that point.

Thanks to Quirk and Black Crow PR for sending me this book proof.

Rating 3.4/5