A timely spinoff thriller with series potential in its own right.
A young graduate student suspects that a corporation will use her game-changing, apocalyptic anthropological research for nefarious purposes in a new novel by Gear and Gear.
The authors expand their Anasazi thriller series, which began with Bone Walker (2008), to introduce 27-year-old Dr. Anika French, who’s developed a revolutionary computer model that could allow archaeologists to understand exactly why history’s greatest civilizations collapsed. After Dr. Mark Schott, Anika’s committee chair and former lover, partners with the shady ECSITE corporation, he makes her a financially irresistible offer to take her on as his research assistant. He insists that ECSITE will only use her research for humanitarian purposes. “I have the gut feeling that something’s wrong about this, Mark,” she tells him, but she accepts, nonetheless. However, Schott steals her research for an article in a scholarly journal, “THE COLLAPSE OF THE NATION-STATE: A PREDICTIVE STATISTICAL MODEL,” which captures the attention of both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense, and they bring Anika in to lead an elite team to investigate what Schott and ECSITE may be up to. The team includes the star of Gear and Gear’s series, anthropologist Maureen Cole (with an assist from archaeologist Dusty Stewart), and bodyguard Skip Murphy. Early on, Stewart states he will miss the days when “all we had to do was worry about Navajo witches and prehistoric serial killers,” and, indeed, readers should be aware going in that this is not Indiana Jones–style archaeology; this is “stochastically modeled statistical probability” and “correlation coefficients” archeology. However, there’s also plenty of danger and well-calibrated suspense to go along with the complicated lingo of the trade. As a character, Schott is merely, as Dusty terms him, a “swine,” but ECSITE CEO Mikael Zoakalski ably fills the void as a despicable villain, and the brilliant Anika develops some fine heroic chops over the course of the novel.
A timely spinoff thriller with series potential in its own right.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63977-006-9
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
