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
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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