A provocative story as dramatically thrilling as it is thoughtful.
In Riaz’s thriller, a government agent attempts to find the son he lost in the aftermath of the United States’ transformation into an Islamic nation.
Jamal Stone has seen his country rent asunder: After an Islamic terrorist organization engulfed America in violent conflict, China refused to buy U.S. treasury bonds, sending the economy into a death spiral. Now, the nation—renamed the Islamic States of America and ruled by a Muslim caliphate—is divided into two warring parts: the West State, which is a stable Islamic land, and the East State, where American patriots continue to resist, a terrifying future made bracingly plausible by the author. Initially, Stone had worked against the Islamic insurgency for the CIA; he was recruited because, as a Muslim, he could infiltrate the enemy. Exhausted by the toll of unending war, saddened over the deaths of his father and wife (the results of a drone strike and a riot, respectively), and anguished over the disappearance of his 3-year-old son, Khalil, he defected to the other side. However, his placid, domestic life in the West State—one in which he achieves a “level of tempered evenness”—is upended when he receives a video from an anonymous sender showing Khalil, now 10 years old. In dramatically gripping fashion, the author chronicles Stone’s dangerous mission to find Khalil in the East State, a sojourn that threatens the new life he has built working for the Islamic Ministry of Central Intelligence away from the front lines. Riaz’s dystopian setting is richly conceived; he convincingly constructs the peculiar contours of a new nation and its extraordinary cultural landscape. Stone’s marriage, a union arranged by the government after the death of his first wife, is explored with remarkable subtlety. As he searches for his son, Stone must come to grips with the true nature of his allegiance to the caliphate and the possibility that his peaceful existence is an “unrealistic aspiration or outright illusion.”
A provocative story as dramatically thrilling as it is thoughtful.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 473
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
Expert, but unsurprising.
The death of an old friend who was more than a friend sends Dr. Kay Scarpetta down her latest rabbit hole.
If every body tells a story, the corpse of 7-year-old Luna Briley sings the blues. On top of the many signs of ongoing physical abuse, there’s the fatal gunshot wound to her head. Ryder and Piper Briley, the wealthy and powerful parents who didn’t call the police until after their daughter died, insist that Luna’s death was an accident, or maybe a suicide. Scarpetta doesn’t think so, and her refusal to release the body to the Brileys’ hand-picked mortician moves them to legal action against her as Virginia’s chief medical examiner. You’d think it would be a relief to put this case aside for another when Scarpetta’s niece, Secret Service agent Lucy Farinelli, calls her and ferries her by helicopter to an abandoned Oz theme park owned by Ryder Briley, but this one’s even more heartbreaking. Scarpetta is there to examine the body of astrophysicist Sal Giordano, her close friend and former lover, who was evidently kidnapped, held in captivity for several hours, and tossed out of an unidentified aircraft. The leading suspects are the Brileys; Carrie Grethen, Lucy’s sociopathic ex-lover, with whom Scarpetta has repeatedly tangled in the past; and the UFO that dumped Giordano’s body without leaving the usual traces for air-traffic technologies to pick up. The multiple rounds of physical examinations Scarpetta conducts on both victims are every bit as meticulous and gripping as fans would expect; the killer’s identity is neither surprising nor interesting, but Cornwell juggles her trademark forensics, and the paranormal hints she’s become increasingly invested in, more dexterously than usual.
Expert, but unsurprising.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781538770382
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
BOOK TO SCREEN
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