Menticulous

Description

Picture the cold open: a scientist in a locked office, swatting at things that aren’t there. His colleague begs him to eat something. He mutters about math. Something screams on a surveillance recording two chapters later, and the movie in your head is running.

That’s the trick James Te Ronde pulls off in his debut, even when the sentences around it wobble. Menticulous moves like it wants a trailer cut, not a book jacket.

The setup: Cooper Timm is a broke engineer living on lo mein. A ProGnosys VP shows up at midnight with a $400,000 contract. The catch: he’s replacing a dead genius on a secret VR project that burned $9.3 billion. It might be tearing a hole into eleven dimensions no one signed up to visit.

The reveal scene is the Sandmobile, a virtual SUV that reshapes itself into a Rolls-Royce grille, then a GMC pickup. The team watches through glass like it’s a car show at CES. It’s a fun set piece, made for a trailer.

The villains are what carry this book. Tom Wharlobe runs his boardroom with thirty-four executives cowering in leather chairs. Te Ronde gives him one cold stare that does more work than three pages of dialogue. Better yet is the Sandman, introduced as comic relief with a bad nickname and a 2001: A Space Odyssey hum. He becomes the most dangerous person in the book. That’s a reversal, not a cheap one, and it lands because the early scenes plant him as a joke.

The cast chemistry is uneven but real when it hits. Cooper and Leslie’s CloudBurst history gives their scenes heat, especially a kitchen-table blowup that ends with a slammed door. Alan Rosewood and his dog, Boo, do more emotional lifting than some of the human pairs. A few of the supporting sketches are thin.

Pacing drags a bit in the boardroom scenes. Characters explain physics to each other in ways that stall the momentum when the plot should be sprinting. The second half of the book earns its speed back: a body count, a psych-ward visit, a deadline to beat.

The ending pays off. It closes on the same gesture that opened the book, same tic, different man in the chair. That circular structure is sharper than half the plotting around it. Wharlobe’s victory lap in the epilogue is a gut-punch closer that makes you want the sequel, corny press-release optimism and all.