An impressively creative blend of political intrigue and sci-fi drama partially undermined by unconvincing premises.
A political thriller portrays a future world on the brink of war as a result of a religious conflict.
Dr. Diana Scorsi is a deeply philosophical technological genius who develops a program, Symmetra, which appears to synthesize all the world’s religious knowledge into a single, higher-order spirituality. She plans to give it away to everyone on the planet for free, as she’s motivated less by profit than philanthropic commitment. Then she’s kidnapped by Ravelton Parlay, an enigmatic trillionaire who’s motivated by Christian extremism and capitalistic opportunism, combined as “Christian Consumerism.” Tuck Squires is assigned to track her down, as he works for Internal Defense, a future version of the CIA. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool “Traditionalist,” a Christian believer who’s devoted to the ideal of American exceptionalism as a tonic to world chaos. The geopolitical scene that debut author Baumeister describes is cleaved by unfamiliar alliances following changes ushered in by a war with Iran and the end of more than 30 years of Republican dominance over American politics. The world’s theocracies all want to possess Symmetra—apparently, it can be used as an instrument of either spiritual enlightenment or mass propaganda—and they threaten to start a world war if the United States doesn’t share it. Baumeister’s fertile imagination conjures a whole new world, riven by real, contemporary global fissures, occupying a kind of parallel political history that branches off from the George W. Bush administration. He’s particularly deft at plumbing the virtues and vices of an explicitly Christian nation. Tuck is a personification of the tension involved, as he’s torn between his patriotic ardor and religious devotion. However, the story hinges on the plausibility of Symmetra—an innovation that never fully makes sense on either technological or theological levels. Baumeister also has a flair for comic dialogue, but sometimes the action flirts with cartoonish melodrama; for example, Ravelton’s enigmatic nom de guerre is “The Presence.”
An impressively creative blend of political intrigue and sci-fi drama partially undermined by unconvincing premises.Pub Date: March 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9984339-4-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: Stalking Horse Press
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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