The concept of latency comes from network engineering. Every system has a delay between the issuance of a command and its execution — between the signal sent and the signal received. The delay is usually measurable in milliseconds. In practice, it is the difference between what you intend and what happens.
Knox has spent his career in that gap. Most of the previous seven books are, in various ways, about working in that gap — finding the delay, exploiting it, acting before a system can respond. The gap is where advantage lives. It's where Knox lives.
I won't say more about the plot than the jacket copy already says. What I'll say about the writing: the adversary in this book is unlike any Knox has faced before. Not more powerful in the conventional sense. More precise. Faster. Relentless in a way that human adversaries — with their fatigue, their doubt, their need to miscalculate occasionally — never quite manage to be. The previous seven antagonists had human vulnerabilities. Knox knew how to find them, how to wait for them. This one doesn't have them.
The threat in Kill Latency doesn't get tired. It doesn't get distracted. It doesn't make the small errors that create the gaps Knox has spent his career exploiting. And it has been watching him long enough to know exactly which gaps he'll try to make.
Writing that required a different approach. The usual tools for building a villain — motivation, backstory, the specific texture of want and fear — didn't apply in the same way. I had to find a different set of questions to ask. It took longer than any antagonist I've written, and I'm still not certain I got it right.
Of the eight books, this is the one where I was least certain, at every stage, that it was working. Not because I doubted the story — I believed in the story from the beginning — but because the story kept asking me to hold things open that I wanted to resolve. Knox is a man who resolves things. That's what he does. Kill Latency is the first Knox book where resolution is not the right frame for what happens.
Whether I pulled it off is not for me to say. But I can say it's the book I've been building toward, in one way or another, across all eight. The book will be available soon.