A smart, atmospheric novel with a hole at its core.
A strong-willed, highly seductive female virologist is found dead at a biotech firm's isolated research center in an unnamed place suggestive of Scandinavia. Myles, an investigator with a shadowy government agency, is on the case.
The biotech company's headquarters are in Ondstrand House, a one-time boarding school with a sordid past. The dead woman is Allegra Stans, who during her seven years with the firm seems to have slept with everyone on campus, men and women, before someone broke her neck. Myles—just Myles, don't call him "Agent Myles"—has a smorgasbord of possible suspects to interview, most of them hiding something. As he learns more and more about Allegra's frequently brief sexual adventures and why some people might have it in for her, he slowly uncovers a conspiracy involving synthetic neurotoxins (they have the properties of cobra snake venom) and "adeno-associated viruses." Allegra seems to have discovered something she wasn't supposed to, but what? A stand-alone from the author of Thick as Thieves (2011) and the John March series, the novel is an admirable attempt at melding Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, with hints of Nordic noir. But Myles, who narrates, is pretty much a blank slate, a clinical sort with a touch of sarcasm to lighten things but no personal history to speak of aside from the death two years ago of his girlfriend. He has an odd (some might say creepy) fixation on women's looks and smells, picking up "notes of pear and freesia" from one woman's perfume, admiring another woman's teeth that were "bright and even in a generous mouth," and taking notice of a woman's "tight chestnut curls...thick, springy, and anarchic." And there is nothing to suggest any physical presence on his part, so when he suddenly makes like Jack Reacher in a fight scene, you wonder where that came from.
A smart, atmospheric novel with a hole at its core.Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-307-96129-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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