The Seventh Guard

The Seventh Guard: Destiny Expires, Francis Halpin, Amazon Digital Services LLC, 2018

Robert is in his mid-twenties, and is abrasive and sarcastic. He has a part-time job in the computer repair department at Best Buy. He has been forbidden to have any contact with customers because of his near-total lack of social skills.

At home, in an attempt to give his life some meaning, Robert conducts strange experiments at the expense of customers and his few friends. One day, he becomes obsessed with a flickering fluorescent tube light in the Best Buy men's bathroom. He records several hours of it, and runs it through his home computers. He is able to turn the flickers into numbers, and turn the numbers into locations. Robert is convinced that he is going to meet some aliens.

Robert attracts the wrong sort of attention (not from a super-secret government agency). This person is able to influence people's minds, leading to Robert almost being murdered inside a Starbucks. As time goes on, Robert finds that he has acquired the same sort of mental abilities. The end of the book has the big confrontation with the Bad Guy. Who walks away at the end? Does the author leave room for a sequel?

It is not easy to make an unlikable person like Robert into a likable person, but the author does it. It's a very good story, with moments of humor, and is a gem of a book. I look forward to a sequel.