Wicked smart sci-fi action on a Wagnerian scale.
The second part of the Brilliance trilogy, in which Sakey (Brilliance, 2013, etc.) turns the action up to 11 and blows lots of things up.
To recap: we live in a world where 1 percent of the world’s children are born with superhuman gifts; some of these “abnorms” or “twists” are good guys and some of them are bad guys. Federal agent Nick Cooper thinks he’s a good guy, using his gift for predicative response to track down terrorist John Smith. But his discovery of a government conspiracy to demonize abnorms by blaming them for an act of terrorism led him to toss his boss off a building at the end of the last book. Now Cooper, along with his companion Shannon Azzi, is tasked by President Lionel Clay with helping him hold the fraying world together. Unlucky for Cooper, there are lots of new players on the scene, all of whom have different visions of the "better world" of the title. Out in the desert, a wealthy abnorm named Erik Epstein builds an Israel-like retreat for his people called the New Canaan Holdfast. In middle America, a new terrorist faction called the Children of Darwin is starving out Tulsa, Fresno, and Cleveland by blowing up food stores and murdering truck drivers. Dr. Abraham Couzen, a mad scientist, has disappeared with what may just be the cure for brilliance, a potential wrinkle that is far more dangerous than it seems. It sounds like a lot to juggle, but Sakey’s execution of a complex plot combined with cinematic style is superb. Sakey even manages to produce a James Bond–level villain whose “gift” is experiencing the passage of time faster than those around him—which makes him the perfect, deadly foil to Cooper. “His name is Soren Johansen,” says Smith by way of introduction. “He’s the most dangerous person I’ve ever met....And my oldest friend.” This is a top-notch entry in a franchise that’s already destined for the movies.
Wicked smart sci-fi action on a Wagnerian scale.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4778-2394-1
Page Count: 390
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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