An entertaining mix of SF and corporate intrigue that pits futuristic gizmos and ancient wisdom against authoritarian...
Righteous hackers guided by Hindu philosophy battle a sinister mind-control device in Berman’s speculative thriller.
The author depicts a future in which the United States is under the tyrannical rule of a nameless dictator, with democracy holding on in the breakaway nation of California. The plot centers on a “pod” of six employees of the Silicon Valley video game company HastinSys who live together on a Bay Area farm. They include emotionally fragile tech writer Darah Ahmadi; hotheaded coder Beers; levelheaded supercoder Jedd; and progressive ultracoder June. Their nemeses are a rival pod of marketing staffers named Kurt, Karin, and Keith who ruthlessly take over the coders’ penthouse office space and get them displaced to a smaller room. The coders discover that the ‘Ks’ are working with the dictator and his Russian backers to release the Happy App, which can subliminally program users’ brains. Repairing to their farm, the coders try to derail the plot by hacking the app. They are assisted by Ansirk, an unhoused, barefoot, flute-playing teen with an enigmatic smile whose name spelled backward approximates that of the Hindu god Krishna. He provides moral support and brainstorms a promising hacking strategy: They will alter the Happy App to impart the calming “soundless sound” of the primordial universe into users’ minds. The author sets her pastiche of the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata in a high-tech civilization—driverless flying cars and holograms abound—and a sleek corporate setting. The novel features nifty capers—Darah seduces a co-worker to plant a bug—along with engrossing procedural sequences, including Jedd’s creation of a virtual road trip to Canada to hide their whereabouts, complete with simulated pit stops and snack purchases. Along the way, Ansirk teaches ethics and advocates giving up control in limpid prose that’s replete with evocative metaphors (“You can go through life like a steering wheel, with your ego-mind running the show. Or you can go through life like [a self-driving vehicle], where your mind takes a back seat and you place your faith in the car’s power”). The result is an imaginative tale alive with captivating ideas.
An entertaining mix of SF and corporate intrigue that pits futuristic gizmos and ancient wisdom against authoritarian politics.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781684632305
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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