If it never lives up to its brainy premise, Parks’ suspenseful novel will beguile, entrance, and fool the sharpest readers.
Parks unfolds a twisty tale about the kidnapping of a Dartmouth physicist whose recondite research has already been stalled by a mysterious malady.
The tobacco mosaic virus, the focus of professor Matt Bronik’s work in quantum interference—the big-picture question of whether “life can go quantum” because scientists can replicate small-scale quantum leaps on unsettlingly larger and larger scales—seems to be affecting him personally. Twice now he’s suddenly blacked out, gone into unexplained comas, and awoken with monster headaches. Has the virus been interfering with him so that his identity has been lost in the universe or merged with his surroundings—for example, with Sheena Aiyagari, the postdoctoral student who tells Detective Emmett Webster that her own mind seems to be merging with Matt’s? Beppe Valentino, his department chair, is worried, and Brigid Bronik, his wife, is frantic. When Matt is felled by a third attack, he’s bundled off to the hospital once more in a grim routine, but this time the ambulance never arrives there, and two of its three staffers are soon found shot dead. A demand for $5 million comes not to Brigid or the Dartmouth lab but to bored billionaire alum Sean Plottner, who’s been trying to get Matt to ditch his job and come work for him. As Webster and Plottner work at cross-purposes to rescue Matt, or to ensure or at least determine that he’s safe, Parks races toward a climax that mercifully leaves the game-changing, larger-than-life questions he’s raised behind.
If it never lives up to its brainy premise, Parks’ suspenseful novel will beguile, entrance, and fool the sharpest readers.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2339-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.
Having been falsely convicted of murder himself years ago, prosecutor Rusty Sabich defies common wisdom in defending his romantic partner’s adopted son against the same accusation.
Now 76, Rusty has retired to the (fictitious) Skageon Region in the upper Midwest, far removed from Kindle County, Turow’s Chicago stand-in, where he was a star attorney and judge. Aaron Housley, a Black man raised in a bleached rural environment, has had his troubles, including serving four months for holding drugs purchased by Mae Potter, his erratic, on-and-off girlfriend. Now, after suddenly disappearing to parts unknown with her, he returns alone. When days go by without Mae’s reappearance, it is widely assumed that Aaron harmed her. Why else would he be in possession of her phone? Following the discovery of Mae’s strangled body and incriminating evidence that points to Aaron, Rusty steps in. Opposed in court by the uncontrollable, gloriously named prosecutor Hiram Jackdorp, he fears he’s in a lose-lose situation. If he fails to get Aaron off, which is highly possible, the boy’s mother, Bea, will never forgive him. If Rusty wins the case, the quietly detached Bea—who, like half the town, has secrets—will have trouble living with the unsparing methods Rusty uses to free Aaron. In attempting to match, or at least approach, the brilliance of his groundbreaking masterpiece Presumed Innocent (1987), Turow has his own odds to overcome. No minor achievement like a previous follow-up, Innocent (2010), the new novel is a powerful display of straightforward narrative, stuffed with compelling descriptions of people, places, and the legal process. No one stages courtroom scenes better than this celebrated Chicago attorney. But the book, whose overly long scenes add up to more than 500 pages, mostly lacks the gripping intensity and high moral drama to keep those pages turning. It’s an absorbing and entertaining read, but Turow’s fans have come to expect more than that.
An accomplished but emotionally undercooked courtroom drama by the author who made that genre popular.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781538706367
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
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