Salt and Signal

Salt and Signal opens with a dead satellite and a coastal town that has begun receiving its transmissions. From there the novel runs hard for four hundred pages and rarely lets the reader catch a breath.

What distinguishes it from the crowded shelf of technological thrillers is its interest in consequences that are not explosive. The book is genuinely curious about what a small fishing community does when it becomes, overnight, strategically important.

The technical material is handled with confidence, though the final act asks the reader to accept a convenient failure of institutional memory. Forgivable, given the momentum.