A light and whimsical sci-fi whodunit with a college campus backdrop.
In this sequel, a physics teacher becomes a prime suspect when a colleague’s death cues a new wave of crimes inspired by mental feats of quantum reality-bending.
Imagine if Janet Evanovich had given Stephanie Plum a science-teaching degree and you might have a handle on the series that began with Quantum Cop (2016). It’s been more than a year since young Boulder, Colorado, college instructor Madison Martin learned that with a little mind power, adrenaline, and physics, just about anyone can alter reality via “q-lapsing”: choosing a preferred outcome from quantum-uncertainty particle/wave duality. In practical terms, that means teleportation, transmutation of matter, telekinesis, and other wizardlike stuff (hard and fast ground rules of q-lapsing are weak at best). In the first book, a nationwide outbreak of “quantum crimes” resulted from a small number of Madison’s avaricious students misusing the talent. Now readers are told all of that has largely been forgotten or covered up (which seems almost as unlikely as q-lapse itself). Then a science colleague Madison didn’t even know turns up dead on campus, horribly murdered, and police suspect her. Meanwhile, Madison’s passionate faculty lover, Andro Rivas—whom she secretly taught q-lapse—has begun acting moody and distant without explanation. Is he a part of the crime? Are the undergraduate villains who were defeated in Quantum Cop somehow back again? Will the hunky new policeman with a stellar body who’s on the case exert a sexier gravitational pull on Madison than unpredictable Andro? There are some clever red herrings and feints here, if perhaps one too many trips to the well of characters and incidents from the first novel. Demarcations between rom-com silliness and the deadly serious are often as indistinct as the ones separating particles and waveforms. Smith (Kat Cubed, 2016, etc.) is a physicist in real life (following up the narrative with a short essay on quantum-mechanical weirdness), and she skillfully flavors the far-fetched stuff with references to such concepts as eigenvalues and the Bose-Einstein Condensate. The temptation is to say that things flip between the quirky and the quarky. But sci-fi fans who like their chick-lit thrillers blended with a Ph.D. should find the formula enjoyable.
A light and whimsical sci-fi whodunit with a college campus backdrop.Pub Date: June 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9861350-4-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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