The Broken Room by Peter Clines

You can still owe the dead. Hector was the best of the best. A government operative who could bring armies to a halt and nations to their knees. But when his own country betrayed him, he dropped off the grid and picked up the first of many bottles. Natalie can’t remember much of her life before her family brought her to the US, but she remembers the cages. And getting taken away to the Project with dozens of other young children to become part of their nightmarish experiments. That’s how she ended up with the ghost of a dead secret agent stuck in her head. And Hector owes Natalie’s ghost a big favor. Now Hector and Natalie are on the run from an army of killers sent to retrieve her. Because the people behind the Project are willing to risk almost anything to get Natalie back and complete their experiments.

The Broken Room by Peter Clines is a weird and thrilling tale combining the sci-fi horror Clines' readers have come to love and expect with a different sort of story. Hector, a spy, is sitting in a bar when he's approached by a little girl who's on the run with a fantastical story. The pair embark on a cross-country adventure with things getting progressively stranger at every turn. The Broken Room is reminiscent of King's The Institute as well as Cline's own Threshold Universe series and Paradox Bound. While I was left wanting to know more about some of the characters and elements of the world, overall I found the journey the two protagonists traveled to be highly compelling. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I've read and enjoyed Peter Clines' Threshold series of books, although Dead Moon didn't seem to fit with the other three books in the series and I didn't think the fourth book Terminus was on par with the first two books 14 and The Fold. This book was another page turner that merged sci-fi/horror with Jason Borne-like intelligence agency, black ops bloody action. Such stories often work when a hard-bitten ex-agent teams up with a government-exploited child running from the bad men. There are only a couple of criticisms I have with the story. One, it doesn't do enough to explain the origin of the creepy phenomenon that affects the little girl Natalie and the other exploited children within the off the radar government “Project.” However, the concept that the children taken for experimentation come from the victims of those crossing the U.S. southern border illegally may unfortunately be closer to reality than fiction. Secondly, I was troubled that Clines, like so many in media today, was always hinting that racism is rampant in the U.S. The hero/protector Hector and the little girl Natalie are both Hispanic. The story mainly takes place in the Southwest where the Hispanic population is large and for the most part accepted, so why write that Hector constantly has to be worried about being targeted because of his race? It just seemed like another cheap shot at pushing division based on racial stereotypes to the general readership.