A gripping but uneven tale about a political revolution.
A thriller sequel sees a woman and her soldiers establish a new republic.
After the devastating events in Miller’s series opener that ended in the death of Princeton professor Angus Turner, an informal, well-intentioned organization called the Book Club has disbanded, with its vigilante members suffering the ill effects of trauma and betrayal. Princeton mathematics professor Albert Puddles, one of the Book Club’s members, is in hiding, drowning his sorrows in alcohol and helplessly following the whirlwind political changes in the United States. He watches from afar as Cristina Culebra and her army rise to power and state after state secedes from America to join the ranks of her Republic of Enlightenment and Democracy. Her use of the life-changing principles of something called the Tree of Knowledge, which involves a math formula and algorithm, allows Cristina to manipulate events to gain absolute control. Yet Albert’s own ability to see the future employing the same concept leaves him hopelessly unable to figure out a way to alter the political landscape. An unpredictable event occurs when a mysterious terrorist known as the Cipher disrupts Cristina’s seemingly unstoppable ascent and organizes a resistance movement. The members of the Book Club see this as the best possible moment to reassemble in a last-ditch effort to stop Cristina’s coup. With deaths, treachery, and a foe in their ranks, Albert and the Book Club face their biggest challenge yet. This sequel, a marked improvement over its predecessor, features a taut plot, less academic prose, and a reduced reliance on the Tree of Knowledge as a narrative gimmick. Instead, this installment skillfully focuses on the personal anguish of Albert as well as on a greater examination of the ethics of using the Tree of Knowledge for good or evil. On the other hand, the Cipher’s modus operandi of leaving fairly easy ciphers to be decrypted by the terrorist’s followers (“Solve the cipher. Follow the Cipher”) undermines the radical’s supposed genius. The peculiar religious motifs connected to the Cipher also feel out of place. And Cristina’s largely unopposed and meteoric rise in the U.S. seems implausible and unearned. Readers’ engagement will depend on the extent to which they embrace the over-the-top premise. Still, fans of the first book will likely enjoy the riveting sequel.
A gripping but uneven tale about a political revolution.Pub Date: March 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73764-630-3
Page Count: 319
Publisher: Houndstooth Books
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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