A terrific tale for fans of the genre.
A fast-moving, tense biothriller set in China.
Nick Foley is a 28-year-old former Navy SEAL and combat medic who decides that life is “about stewardship, doing something good with the body and mind.” This leads him to do volunteer work on an irrigation project in western China. While he helps dig ditches, a local Uyghur suddenly contracts a horrible disease and dies a grotesque death. Surprisingly to Foley, the illness is not contagious. Soon he’s quarantined and interrogated by the Snow Leopards, a Chinese counterterrorism unit investigating the possibility of bioterrorism. They know about Foley’s past and suspect him of working for the U.S. government. With them is Dr. Chen “Dash” Dazhong, who is, of course, beautiful, of China’s Center for Disease Control. She quickly realizes she can work with Foley to help solve the mystery. Were the disease—if that’s what it is—viral or bacterial, it would trigger an epidemic, but this appears to be targeted. They speculate they’ve witnessed an untraceable weapon being tested in remote China, where supposedly no one cares about the victims. Meanwhile, Maxim Polakov is a Russian spy running a Chinese asset code-named Prizrak. Polakov is very interested in an “entirely new class of weapon” that could kill millions and make him a hero of the new Russia. A number of people die, including a good friend of Dash's. Details aren’t for the squeamish—eyes turn to “gelatinous goo”—but all the violence advances the story. Foley and Dash had better get to the bottom of this menace because it has a 100 percent mortality rate, and the ultimate bad guy says “I am going to turn Beijing red” with his opponents’ blood. An exciting showdown takes place in Beijing’s Underground City, a real Cold War creation of Mao Zedong.
A terrific tale for fans of the genre.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62953-594-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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