I kept wondering why this author's name felt so familiar, and only just realized it's because I tried to read his debut novel and...couldn't finish it! Lol! Thankfully, it seems like his writing game has improved since then, because I swallowed this book in a day and a night of fevered reading. This isn't really a superhero book--- but that's the category where I lump all the mutants-with-powers stories. This is a near-future world where mutants have manifested at a rapid rate, and the US is scrambling to find ways to categorize, track, and control the mutant population before their abilities wreck havoc with the current systems. Enter Nick Cooper, who is a mutant who hunts down terrorist mutants, who in the wake of a horrific massacre, volunteers to go undercover to infiltrate an abnormal terrorist organization and kill its ringleader. Meanwhile, he's also in terror of his young daughter being discovered as a Tier 1 Brilliant and taken away into evil brain-washing academies designed to traumatize-control mutants while they are still young and malleable. 
 Great premise, with good pacing and action, mixed in with measured dashes of superpowers. The powers featured here, however, are not of the flashy, Hollywood movie kind, however. No one is flying or shooting flames out of their hands. It's more like taking natural skills of regular people and amplifying them 100x. In this world, you get human calculators, extreme empathy, ultimate computer whizzes, scientific geniuses out the whazzoo... 
 I'm actually torn over rating this book with a 3 or 4 stars. I certainly read it fast enough to warrant 4 stars...but afterwards, I was dissatisfied a little bit. It's hard to articulate...but it feels like the main character was just lacking a little bit of something in all areas to prevent me from loving him. For example, he tries to crack jokes...but they aren't really that funny. He considers a back-and-forth light-hearted conversation with a pretty ally-enemy to be easygoing, flirty banter and...it felt somewhat clunky and contrived to me. And his powers! He's tier 1...but somehow it seemed like the definition of what is "tier 1" varied a lot. He is a patterner, able to pick up dozens of physical cues every second to be able to predict what a person will do. And it's fascinating at first to see him use it to track down rogue mutants and basically ace being a cop. But by the end of the novel, his ability seems to become less and less relevant/powerful; the more frenzied the action, the more powerful the characters he's up against, the more of the plot of revealed, then less it seems his powers matter. In fact, when it does kick in, it sounds a lot less like a power and more like a regular guy thinking things through. And not necessarily in the most logical way either. True, disclaimers abound that state that his gift is "intuitive" and makes logical leaps. But those gaps feel more like the author handwaving complexities he doesn't want to deal with rather than what constitutes a "tier 1" ability. Then he also runs off to assassinate the terrorist mastermind based on some other mutant's pre-packaged information and equipment, without coming up with his own plan of attack/approach. Granted, he was short on time, but still....you'd think an assassin would take more care, considering he's up against a bad guy whose ability is to be a master strategist. I guess you can chalk it up to Nick Cooper being more of a cop than an assassin. But regardless, I did get thrown out of the story a little pondering these points. 
 This is still a highly enjoyable read, and I look forward to reading the books that come after!