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
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
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