The Volcan Council

The Volcan Council is thick, paranoid, and really ambitious. It is preceded by a group of winged creatures known as Volcan who organize themselves into a secret council to watch over the humans and their own kind - implanting themselves into police departments and SWAT teams and forensic laboratories - even as something much darker is being constructed in the background. And that darker one is Victor, he is not just a villain with a grudge. He is conducting psychological experiments on other Volcan, systematically depriving them of empathy and free will, creating soldiers who do not simply obey their commands, but literally cannot disobey. And it really shakes you when you realise the extent of his experiment, the trial of conditioning, the mapping of the neural processes, the screams on the other side of closed doors. The interesting part about the book is that it is not a council versus Victor book. It is about the fact that no one trusts anybody completely. Someone has an undercover agent in the organisation of Victor, there are splintering in the council itself, and the paranoia continues to escalate until you suspect every conversation. And that was the best of the book-- tense silence, as though the floor had been ready to collapse at any time. Its weakness lies in the burden of its own exertion. The story occasionally becomes tedious to present tactical briefings or world-building at the moment you need it to move forward. Certain characters are not given their due space. However, the gist of it, betrayal, power, the price of keeping a group together when trust is the first one to go, hits even harder than you could imagine.