Dare to Know

“A voraciously readable page-turner of a novel.”—Cory Doctorow

“A razor-smart sci-fi corporate noir nightmare. Dare to Know is what happens when Willy Loman sees through the Matrix.”—Daniel Kraus, co-author of The Shape of Water

This mind-bending and emotional speculative thriller is set in a world where the exact moment of your death can be predicted—for a price.
 
Our narrator is the most talented salesperson at Dare to Know, an enigmatic company that has developed the technology to predict anyone’s death down to the second. Divorced, estranged from his sons, and broke, he's driven to violate the cardinal rule of the business by forecasting his own death day. The problem: his prediction says he died twenty-three minutes ago. 
 
The only person who can confirm its accuracy is Julia, the woman he loved and lost during his rise up the ranks of Dare to Know. As he travels across the country to see her, he’s forced to confront his past, the choices he's made, and the terrifying truth about the company he works for. 
 
Wildly ambitious and highly immersive, this thought-provoking thriller explores the destructive power of knowledge and collapses the boundaries between reality, myth, and conspiracy as it races toward its shocking conclusion.

James Kennedy is the author of the horror thriller Bride of the Tornado, which the Guardian named one of the “Best Recent Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Novels” in September 2023. James‘s previous books include the sci-fi novel Dare to Know, which was named by the Times Saturday Review as a Best Sci-Fi Book of 2021, and the young adult fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish. In addition, James is the founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, an annual video contest in which kid filmmakers create short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds. He also hosts the Secrets of Story podcast with Matt Bird. James lives in Chicago.