Timely, relevant, and frenetic, this bracing thriller brandishes a healthy social conscience.
A pair of young professionals faces conspiracies and a pandemic in Donald Trump’s America.
Author and literature professor Finney’s latest political potboiler is set 10 years after his immigrant rights/2010 midterm election debut thriller, Money Matters (2019). This time, Bay Area married couple Adam and Julia Gosford find themselves stressed along with the rest of the country thanks to a conspiracy-laden presidency compounded by an encroaching pandemic. As a university computer scientist, Adam knows well the implications of a deadly virus like Covid-19 as it begins its spread worldwide, especially when an oblivious and deflective government fails to take this public health threat seriously. When a team of Homeland Security investigators interrogates him about the identity of a hacker who exposed compromising emails from the incoming director of a high-profile government agency, he knows things are going haywire. Julia, a public policy advocate for the ACLU, also feels the increasing mayhem in a hotly contested election year where conspiracy theorist collective QAnon is busy spreading misinformation and suspicion. Finney effectively draws from recent headlines to craft the novel’s many aspects, which most readers will cringingly recognize. As the coronavirus paranoia engulfs the couple, whose relationship has seen better days, so do their involvement in extramarital affairs and a bewildering amount of QAnon research. For any other era, the conspiracy theories and complexities would be outlandish, but this is 2020, and nothing is off the table. The problem lies in the sheer amount of complications, as Finney overstuffs his story and it ultimately becomes unwieldy. Julia’s resentful ex-boyfriend Dave resurfaces to wreak havoc on her marriage after a careless indiscretion; her best friend Amy’s husband comes out; and Adam cheats with a colleague. Then Julia lapses into drug dependency. Surprising moments of social commentary sometimes surface, addressing topics like homelessness, the American dream, LGBTQ+ rights, racism, and what kind of future the Gosfords’ young daughter, Liz, will have to contend with as she ages. The author vividly captures the chaos and mayhem of 2020, anchoring all the pandemonium with a daring duo that fights for love, justice, and humanity throughout an unforgettable year in human history. If the tale’s histrionics aren’t enough, readers will delight in the surprise conclusion.
Timely, relevant, and frenetic, this bracing thriller brandishes a healthy social conscience.Pub Date: March 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9998003-3-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: KDP
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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