Back to the lab.
The discovery of genetic information that unlocks the mysteries of life and creation challenges two scientists and imperils their lives.
Readers lacking an advanced, technical background in biology and physics and their attendant vocabularies will find this debut thriller a tough slog. Author Buff has not here surmounted the challenge of making the scientifically complex comprehensible to a general readership. Too often the prose befits a college textbook, as here: "Scientists had known for some time the incredibly precise balance of the physical constants, the relative proportions between gravitational, electromagnetic, strong nuclear, and weak nuclear forces.” And too often, thinly developed characters speak as if they were lecturing advanced classes, as here: “Some type of algorithmic processing is definitely needed. The Mandelbrot equation is an example of just one possible type.” And while readers of a scientific bent may decipher the prose, they may well find the plot a predictable and slow-moving succession of stock thriller scenes. A prologue set on the Russian-Ukranian border in 1998, for example, finds a Russian scientist hoping to reach America to work on a project that will "unlock the secrets of creation." The action then moves forward to Boston and the present, where geneticist Stephen Bishop is "about to decode what could be the Rosetta Stone of all life." That sinister groups may seek Bishop’s findings becomes apparent when, in a decently written action scene, his colleague is rubbed out in a car chase. Bishop nevertheless persists, enlisting Dan Lawson, a former cyber intelligence analyst, in his pursuit. Meanwhile, a group known as “The Commission,” which seeks “immortality through the merging of man and machine,” determines to go after Bishop’s discoveries even if they must threaten Bishop’s young daughter, who has leukemia. Threaded through the long pursuits that follow is the conflict between religious and scientific beliefs. The resolution in the final chapter is a sop to both sides.
Back to the lab.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-501-14071-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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