An inventive and mostly entertaining novel about science and survival.
A group of shipwrecked scientists become trapped in a subterranean biodome in Pinkos’ debut disaster novel.
On July 3, 1994, the ship Neiare leaves the port city of Balao, Ecuador, with a crew of 28 souls. Though it looks like a small oil tanker, the Neiare is actually a corporate research vessel carrying genetically engineered crops enclosed in a series of building-sized airtight plexiglass pods. Most of those aboard are not sailors, but horticulturalists. Everything proceeds smoothly until, just 16 days out of port, a tropical storm descends upon their patch of the Pacific. Things go south quickly: “Neiare was like a giant playground teeter totter bending at the mid-axis point on each side of the huge wave. The sound of the ship’s back breaking was like a groan of relief from some of the original, tired, twenty-four-year-old steel being strained to its limit.” The ship snaps in two, killing half of those aboard, including most of the sailors. As the ship’s remnants settle on an underwater shelf, the survivors—primarily scientists—find themselves temporarily protected in the air bubble created by the plexiglass walls of the plant pods. Now they must figure out a way to survive long enough for rescue to arrive...and the secret may be found in the plants themselves. Pinkos’ muscular prose adeptly establishes the high stakes of the scientists’ situation, which include structural and resource concerns as well as more sensational dangers: “In the backs of the crew’s minds, every time a shark hit the glass, whether it was hard or just barely a rub, they half expected a crack to show up above their heads. They could easily imagine it would start as a spider web of lines, slowly growing until the glass finally lost its integrity with a burst and flooded the pod in minutes.” The author is less skilled when it comes to dialogue and psychology—but like an audience at a disaster movie, readers of this adventure yarn will likely care more about the chaos than they do about the character development.
An inventive and mostly entertaining novel about science and survival.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781039175488
Page Count: -
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2023
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
Gritty little gems.
A collection of six short stories about crimes both planned and accidental, the collision of dreams and reality, and the things people do for love.
John Highland, for example, faces a lifetime in prison. But if he can do one “Final Score” before turning himself in, at least he can set up his beloved wife for the rest of her days. His plan is impossible to pull off, which is even more reason to do it—a brilliant finale to his criminal career. Another tale takes the reader to Rhode Island, where liquor sales are banned on Sundays. One liquor store maintains a secret “Sunday List” of thirsty patrons and their liquid requirements to get them through the Lord’s Day. Some stories are more serious—a drunk kid kills a young woman in a DUI and is headed to prison. But the kid’s cousin, a cop, worries he may not survive long in the general population. If only the kid could get assigned to the “North Wing,” where a mob boss prisoner protects its inmates. “True Story” is sharp, funny, and one hundred percent dialogue. Guys swap wacky crime stories in a diner. A sample: “Listen—Angela, for all her fine qualities, was no Rose Scholar, either.” But then in “The Lunch Break,” Dave is hired to watch over the spoiled actress Brittany McVeigh and make sure she shows up on set sober and on time. She is only 5-foot-3, but “bad things come in small packages” and she’s a “drunken, drug-addled, promiscuous little diva” who claims she’s being stalked. In the final tale, “Collision,” life is darn near perfect for an upwardly mobile white family of three. Brad McAlister is a highly talented hotel manager. Upper management invites him and his wife to a fancy restaurant and offers him his dream promotion. But in a squeal of tires in the parking lot, their lives change forever. Will the McAlisters’ deep love for each other survive? Each of these stories has clever plotting and sharp dialogue, a hallmark of all the author’s work. Winslow had previously announced his retirement, but maybe that collided with his love of writing.
Gritty little gems.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9780063450424
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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