This was an interesting story with an interesting protagonist. My favorite part was that the main character kept insisting he wasn’t a hero, and acting accordingly. Very much chaotic neutral, with a little bit of a good guy slant. My least favorite part was the time jumping. I got a little confused with what was happening now, vs. several layers of flashbacks.
Aliens are an accepted fact of life, although nobody knows much or can do much about them. Something crashed into Nigeria, made a dome around itself, and stayed. Nobody ever comes out, and very few people go in. Psychics and “sensitives” are another accepted fact of life, although there aren’t very many of them. Kaaro is one of these sensitives. He has a day job at a bank, reading books out loud to mess up the bad psychics who lurk and pick passwords and PINs out of customers’ brains. His other job is for a secret(ish?) agency that uses sensitives to take information from hostages’ brains. He doesn’t really like either job, and just kind of coasts along until the story keeps throwing stuff at him to draw him in. There’s a girlfriend with a mysterious past and a mysterious family, a boss he’s half in love with, a murky history with the alien dome, and several current and past missions that the book jumps back and forth between. There are also some flashbacks to his younger days as a thief (his psychic ability leans toward the ”finder” variety, including knowing where people keep their valuables).
It’s a lot of flashbacks. It all does tie in to the major story, but it sometimes took me a bit to decipher what was going on and when. The end shows us a glimpse of a huge conspiracy and sets up the second book (it’s a trilogy), but I haven’t decided yet where that’s going on my TBR list. Not at the top, for sure. But I’m interested to see if circumstances force Kaaro to accept the hero role, whether he likes it or not.