An entertaining mystery set in an intriguing near future.
A man seeks vengeance for the death of his father in a climate change-ravaged Kansas in this dystopian sequel.
The year is 2048, and an ecologically devastated America has devolved into a loose association of regional republics. One year after his father was murdered, Daniel McFaul must return to his hometown of Dodge City and take control of the dead man’s restaurant—or forfeit his inheritance. He leaves his girlfriend, Sally Bergen, in Savannah, Georgia, but not before encountering a wealthy computer whiz named Hunter Houdini, who tells Daniel: “I’m the man who can help you find your father’s killer before he kills you.” Houdini’s plan is to recover the remains of the robot that lasered Mayor Plato McFaul dead in the middle of Wyatt Earp Boulevard and then promptly self-destructed. If they can find the robot, it can lead them to the cabal behind the assassination. Houdini has his own reasons for getting to the bottom of the crime: He suspects that these are the same men who kidnapped his daughter years ago. After Daniel survives an attempt on his life at his lawyer’s office, he and Houdini set up a sting inspired by the latter’s famous namesake. Daniel has his doubts about trusting Houdini—he can’t decide if the man is a fool, a con artist, or both. But he can’t rely on anyone else in Dodge, all of whom are connected to his father’s business or political interests in some way. Can Daniel live long enough to force his father’s killers to reveal themselves? And can his relationship with Sally survive the appearance of a beautiful new assistant manager at his father’s restaurant?
Congdon’s sequel to Heat 30:1 (2015) is a lighthearted mix of mystery, Western, and SF. The vision of the future he paints is simultaneously realistic and fantastical: People eat bugs; robots work as waiters; and airplanes take off and land via the use of magnets, but the restaurant business is still largely the same as it’s ever been. Despite all that has changed by 2048, the characters don’t speak that differently than they do today. In fact, they often sound like they might be from 1948: “Hey look, no slick arguments, no moral razzmatazz. If you’re going to confess to a crime, or to witnessing a crime, let me call the cops right now and do us both a favor.” At one point, Daniel even makes a casual reference to the Keystone Kops. The characters, setting, and mood are all highly enjoyable. This is an ecologically minded vision of the future that isn’t all doom and gloom. But the book’s pacing is a bit slow for a work of speculative fiction. Characters signal plans and developments long before they come to pass, which will weigh at times on readers’ patience. There aren’t quite as many surprises as one might expect, and everything winds up in a fairly predictable place. That said, the author has created a world that is pleasant to spend some time in and he’s populated it with people whom readers will like being around.
An entertaining mystery set in an intriguing near future.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-67235-402-8
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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