by Bruce Pinkos ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
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
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by Freida McFadden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2025
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.
A woman fears she made a fatal mistake by taking in a blood-soaked tween during a storm.
High winds and torrential rain are forecast for “The Middle of Nowhere, New Hampshire,” making Casey question the structural integrity of her ramshackle rental cabin. Still, she’s loath to seek shelter with her lecherous landlord or her paternalistic neighbor, so instead she just crosses her fingers, gathers some candles, and hopes for the best. Casey is cooking dinner when she notices a light in her shed. She grabs her gun and investigates, only to find a rail-thin girl hiding in the corner under a blanket. She’s clutching a knife with “Eleanor” written on the handle in black marker, and though her clothes are bloody, she appears uninjured. The weather is rapidly worsening, so before she can second-guess herself, former Boston-area teacher Casey invites the girl—whom she judges to be 12 or 13—inside to eat and get warm. A wary but starving Eleanor accepts in exchange for Casey promising not to call the police—a deal Casey comes to regret after the phones go down, the power goes out, and her hostile, sullen guest drops something that’s a big surprise. Meanwhile, in interspersed chapters labeled “Before,” middle-schooler Ella befriends fellow outcast Anton, who helps her endure life in Medford, Massachusetts, with her abusive, neglectful hoarder of a mother. As per her usual, McFadden lulls readers using a seemingly straightforward thriller setup before launching headlong into a series of progressively seismic (and increasingly bonkers) plot twists. The visceral first-person, present-tense narrative alternates perspectives, fostering tension and immediacy while establishing character and engendering empathy. Ella and Anton’s relationship particularly shines, its heartrending authenticity counterbalancing some of the story’s soapier turns.
A grim yet gleefully gratifying tale of lost innocence and found family.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781464260919
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
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SEEN & HEARD
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
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New York Times Bestseller
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
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