No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

By James Smythe

How far would you go to save your family from an invisible threat? A terrifyingly original thriller from the author of The Machine.

ClearVista is used by everyone and can predict everything.

It’s a daily lifesaver, predicting weather to traffic to who you should befriend.

Laurence Walker wants to be the next President of the United States. ClearVista will predict his chances.

It will predict whether he's the right man for the job.

It will predict that his son can only survive for 102 seconds underwater.

It will predict that Laurence's life is about to collapse in the most unimaginable way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins UK
• Release date: May 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9780007541928

James Smythe

James Smythe has written scripts for a number of video games, and teaches creative writing in London. His previous novel was The Explorer.

Reviews for No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

[nwhyte-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The sfnal element of the plot isn't elucidated terribly well, and that the 384 pages seemed an awfully long journey to an ending that was inevitable from pretty early on. I also thought (this is a more minor and personal quibble) that the depiction of the election campaign machinery was rather crude.

[laine4cunningham · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

No Harm Can Come to a Good Man by James Smythe
HarperCollins, Avail Jun 9, 2015
This novel works on so many levels: suspenseful without losing touch with the internal lives of the primary characters, conceptually significant, and very well written. I wasn’t familiar with this author before being provided with an ARC from the publisher but you can bet he’s on my permanent radar now.
No Harm presents a future that seems not so far away. The internet has been harnessed to provide predictions about common life events ranging from what type of rental car someone will prefer to whether they’ll get a promotion. Since every one of us encounters these algorithms while browsing…always a bit creepy when a news site hands me an ad for a shirt I browsed on some other site because it’s so out of touch with where my mind is while reading news articles...the novel’s concept feels real enough.
This is the backdrop of our everyday lives. And for a time, it seems to only be the backdrop of this novel. A man, a good man, decides to run for president only a year after his son drowned in the lake at the family’s second home. His wife and two daughters go along with his plans, supporting him as only a political family can—by tamping down their personalities with more PR-friendly activities. When Laurence’s campaign advisor Amit encourages him to apply for prediction results through ClearVista’s algorithm, his already somewhat difficult race turns tragic.
There’s the fact that ClearVista returns a 0% chance of success…and then there’s the video. Nightmarish for any father, the video shows the country’s worst terror, that of a war veteran who has finally cracked. While Laurence struggles to prove the video’s prediction wrong, Amit takes a twofold path that shores up his own career while trying to shove his candidate back on track. Laurence’s wife works quietly yet with a strength that cannot be questioned to help her husband and save her two remaining children.
The arc follows Laurence down his increasingly fractured decline along with the wife’s staunch support. Only in the final moments is Deanna forced to turn against him. Amit, meanwhile, is the only one to truly take all their fates into his hands and actively work against the prediction and the social machinery that believes in ClearVista with such evangelical fever.
Emotionally gripping and a true novel for our times.
5 stars!