Echoes is a science fiction crime thriller series written by author Therin Knite
. It is set in the 2700s and follows the life and times of twenty-three-year-old protagonist Adem Adamend.
After a man-made apocalyptic event involving a Cure for Cancer gone wrong wiped out 99% of the human population in the 2200s, society floundered for centuries before it recovered. In the 2500s, the remainder of humanity joined together and created the United Republic of Earth, a globally united government, that rules over 20 districts spanning six continents and, as of the 28th century, a population of about 2.3 billion.
Echoes primarily takes place in the District of Columbia, the modern-day east coat of the United States.
Adem Adamend, a former Child Prodigy turned arrogant and stoic young adult, lives in the capital city of the District of Columbia: Washington (not to be confused with present-day Washington, D.C., which was completely demolished in the the aforementioned apocalypse).
The Smart Guy with a Dark and Troubled Past, Adem works as a Crime Scene Investigator for the Interdistrict Bureau of Intelligence (IBI), a CIA/FBI-type of government organization tasked with solving and preventing major crimes. Using his Sherlock Scan abilities to mentally reconstruct crimes, Adem is capable of solving cases far more quickly than his peers, but his arrogance makes coworkers resent him—save for his one and only friend, the Genius Ditz computer whiz Jin Connors, with whom Adem shares a deep bond resulting from a incident that occurs before the series begins, the "Jericho Bombing."
The first book in the series, itself named Echoes, begins with Adem getting called by his Mean Boss, Briggs, to a strange murder scene. Using his Sherlock powers, Adem discovers the middle-aged lawyer victim was murdered by...a dragon. A dragon that completely vanished off the face of the Earth after it burned the lawyer to death. But before Adem can make heads or tails of the murder, the case gets swiped from the IBI by the mysterious EDPA, the Echo Detection and Prevention Agency, a top-secret organization that investigates "weird" events. Adem, however, being a curious fellow, refuses to let the most interesting case he's ever seen slip out of his grasp...
And so begins Adem Adamend's journey into the world of echoes—dreams that come to life.
Also known as the series where it's always but never All Just a Dream.
The Current/Announced Books in the Echoverse are:
- Echoes (Jan 2014)
- Epitaphs (April 2015, forthcoming)
- Encodings (Nov 2015, forthcoming)
This series contains examples of:
- After-Action Healing Drama: Near the end of Echoes (the first book), medics inject Adem with an unspecified drug concoction to force him to wake up from an echo he's trapped in. He immediately has a heart attack as a result of the drugs and has to be rushed to the hospital.
- Badass Driver: Murrough. He (illegally) drives manually (as opposed to using the automatic AI driver installed in all cars) through a city where the average highway speeds are 200+ miles per hour.
- Badass Longcoat: Starting in Epitaphs, Dynara and Murrough wear long white coats to signal their positions as head of EDPA departments. Dynara is the Commissioner of the Field Agents' Corps, and Murrough is the Captain of EDPA Security.
- Casual Danger Dialog: Dynara and Adem do this whenever they're in an echo together.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: The final showdown in Echoes (the first book), where (a furious Adem uses his echo-maker powers to hunt down a terrified, fleeing Brennian, shoot him in the chest, and then push him off the edge of the dream with a butterfly—that Adem created earlier by destroying Brennian's own dream dragon.)
- Darkened Building Shootout: The deserted Club Valkyrie shootout in Echoes. Dynara manages to land a shot on an assassin in the shadows of a pitch black dance floor from fifty feet away.
- Door of Doom: In Echoes, Adem is walking down a hallway full of closed doors he needs to open in order to find the antagonist (Brennian). He belatedly realizes that since he's in a dream, anything could be hiding behind the doors.
- Empty Elevator: In Echoes, when Dynara and Adem are searching for the antagonist in the Club Valkyrie dream, the elevator arrives in front of them and opens...to reveal nothing. It's an invitation to come upstairs, where the bad guy is waiting for them to arrive.
- Extremely Short Timespan: Most of the books in the series take place over the course of a few days, due to the time-sensitive nature of the echoes themselves.
- The Main Characters Do Everything: Adem and the rest of Night Team One are the "premier" team at EDPA, meaning they get called in to work any cases deemed high priority by the organization. Since the books revolve around a series of escalating "high priority" cases, Night Team One ends up doing everything, all the time, from things far beyond their collective skill sets to the marginally important tasks that would usually be relegated to lower-ranked agents.
