LABYRINTH by A.G. Riddle

5 stars!

Just LOVED this smart, thrilling and highly original sci-fi thriller! It’s a lengthy read, and SO SO worth it!

Alan Norris, a single-dad vet who recently lost his wife to cancer, is raising his daughter by himself and working as a middle school history teacher. He lost the bottom half of one of his legs in an IED explosion and returned home with both an artificial leg and PTSD.

He and his daughter are still grieving this loss of his wife and her mother, though Alan reconnects a friendship with an old girlfriend who has taken the P.E. instructor at his school. She emerges to play a pivotal back-up parenting role for Alan and romance rekindles.

Alan also suffers bout of ringing in the inner ears, tinnitus. During one night-time episode of tinnitus, he wakes up in an abandoned warehouse with a dead body of a soldier he knows next to him and no memory of how he got there or what happened. He covers things up and rushes home, shocked. He also sees a set string of numbers that keep re-appearing when he hears this clanging noise as tinnitus sets in and he loses his memory.

Trying to figure out what’s going on, Alan stumbles onto a web site which is the string of numbers. There, he connects with a small elusive group both experiencing tinnitus, memory loss, and seeing the same string of numbers. The group slowly begins to interact with Alan, and part of what they ask him to do to prove they can trust him is to join a trial for sufferers of PTSD and tinnitus.

The company Amersa (this “a-mersion”) has developed a virtual reality world designed to increase humanity’s brain capacity, and ability to handle complex, multi-variable thinking. They’ve designed this world, called the Labyrinth, to be experienced fully immersed in sensory clothing and equipment. Ultimately, they hope that humanity will find the virtual reality way more rewarding than real life, and spend money to spend all their time within it. Alan applies for the trial, and to his surprise gets accepted.

Alan’s experiences in the Labyrinth start to eerily parallel those in his life outside of the virtual reality session, and clearly something mysterious and massive is happening in connection with the Labyrinth. The tension keeps ratcheting up as the book races to a completely surprising end.

Ultimately, Riddle blends the plot intensity with thought-provoking and haunting philosophical musings about the future of  AI, humans, and both of their evolutions.

Thanks to Head of Zeus, AdAstra, and NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.

Stacy DeBroff

Stacy DeBroff, founder and CEO of Mom Central.com and social and digital consultancy, Influence Central, is a social media strategist, attorney, and best-selling parenting author. A sought-after expert for national media, she trend-spots regularly with national brands and speaks frequently to national and international audiences on a wide range of subjects, including influencer marketing, social media, entrepreneurship, and consumer trends. A passionate cook, gardener, reader, and tennis player, she adores this new chapter of post-college-age parenting.