A Novel by Cara Jade
LIKE
Love through a lens. Obsession through a wall.
Murder over a word. And an act of kindness that changes everything.
A Novel by Cara Jade
Love through a lens. Obsession through a wall.
Murder over a word. And an act of kindness that changes everything.
In the year 2185, imposter houseflies watch as people shop and undress in the Atom Palm, a 90-floor vertical city where people live, work, and commute.
The billionaire who owns the building runs a human trafficking ring in the tunnels and subbasements where women are sold to the rich and powerful. Paid in Kaspa. Guarded by the same AI that reminds everyone to hydrate.
Gia Laurens is CIA, spying under cover as an interior decorator to help her brother—paralyzed and voiceless in the building's care ward. The technology to let him speak exists. The agency promised to deliver it. They lied.
LIKE tells the interwoven stories of a romance writer and her neurotic editor, a nuclear engineer who follows a stray cat, a cam girl who discovers the fly on her wall has a crush on her, a detective who can't get a warrant because the judges are clients, and the paralyzed man who never stopped listening.
For readers of 1984, Neuromancer, and White Noise
Taut nylon between her thumb and forefinger, the guitar string caught the bathroom light at an angle that erased it. Gia tilted her wrist. Reappeared. Vanished again. A filament of wound wire thinner than the veins in her eyelid, and etched along its length, in typeface no naked retina could resolve, a message from her drop.
Spectrographic lenses, bulky and passing for medical, the kind optometrists abandoned in the previous century, she pressed them friendly to her eyes. Bathroom's travertine walls dissolved into magnification. Swimming up through layers of optical correction, her focal depth scrolled into view the micro-etched text.
turkey for dinner at 7 Tues
Barefoot on heated tile, hair damp from state-timed shower, towel slung over the good shoulder, sugar skull calaverita barrette clipped to wet strands above her left ear. Her training officers would have eye-rolled her out of Langley for being half-naked.
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ASIN: B0GV7CTD9G
Listen on AmazonUnder the hood of the prose.
The first-person thoughts don't just color the narration, they interrupt it. There is a lot of POV-hopping! Close third-person narration that drops into first-person interiority without warning, the character's thoughts bleed through mid-paragraph, present-tense against past-tense narration, unannounced. No transition, no italics-as-apology.
Voice just shifts.
Internal monologue runs present-tense against past-tense narration, creating a constant temporal friction—what happened vs. what the character is thinking right now. Broken, fragmented sentences are intentional, structural scaffolding. The book accelerates by getting shorter. Chapters compress as the plot tightens. This is a thriller pacing strategy.
Dystopian literary thriller: George Orwell (1984) meets William Gibson (Neuromancer) meets Don DeLillo (White Noise). The surveillance architecture is Orwellian, the tech-language is Gibsonian, the paranoid interiority is DeLillo. LIKE is near-future satirical dystopia with body-data harvesting and political control, and the building-as-world is the setting and a character itself. The invented compound language, the sexual/surveillance overlap, institutional captivity, the POV fragmentation… it fuses cyberpunk worldbuilding with literary-thriller pacing and a tactile-corporeal register that neither genre typically prioritizes.
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