An engrossing and timely entry in a promising series.
A woman, accused of terrorism to fit her galactic government’s false narrative, fights to clear her name and keep her young family safe in Strong’s SF thriller sequel.
In Home: Interstellar (2015), 20-something Meriel Hope exposed the galaxywide corruption that enabled a bloody ambush aboard the starship Princess10 years before, which left her, her sister Elizabeth, and other children orphaned and traumatized. Now, in the year 2188, both sisters have found some semblance of peace on a rural planet called Haven. Meriel and her partner, John, are loving parents to her stepdaughters, Sandy and Becky. But then the powers that be—including the government of the United Nations of Earth—launch a media campaign to discredit Meriel, including a faked video of her retracting her accusations. The footage triggers Meriel’s painful flashbacks of her experience on the Princessbut also reignites her determination to set the record straight. Meanwhile, tensions run high between Haven’s farmers and newly arrived space refugees. When several people with scarred stomachs are found dead, Meriel immediately suspects that the camp has been infiltrated by the Archers—a quasi-religious group loyal to the Archtrope, who rules from a Vatican-styled palace on the planet Calliope. While Meriel, John, and the girls explore the glittering space station LeHavre, the Archers and their collaborators launch their final attempt to silence Meriel. The fictional universe that Strong has created for this series feels impressively real; the author has clearly put a lot of work into developing its many facets, from its seedy bars to its spirituality to its fictional historical figures. Indeed, readers may sometimes feel overloaded with worldbuilding information—although a glossary is included. Many of these futuristic elements are fun, but Strong also effectively tackles serious topics, such as media bias and bodily autonomy. There are gory moments, which are rare but memorable, and they’ll stick with readers. Additionally, in a genre full of brooding teen protagonists, Meriel is a refreshingly adult heroine, and John, a doting father to his daughters and supportive partner, stands out for his unconventional masculinity.
An engrossing and timely entry in a promising series.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9863599-5-8
Page Count: 502
Publisher: Impulse Fiction
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.
The eternal jostling for power in Rome and the Vatican is juiced by a development that attracts the attention of the Magellan Billet and its foremost alumnus, Cotton Malone.
Eric Gaetano Casaburi, secretary of Italy’s National Freedom Party, anticipates a decisive victory for the party if Sergio Cardinal Ascolani, the Vatican’s secretary of state, will lend his full-throated support. Of course, the Church isn’t supposed to meddle in contemporary politics, but Eric makes an offer he doesn’t think Ascolani can refuse. Five hundred years ago, Giuliano di Lorenzo de’ Medici loaned Pope Julius II ten million florins the Church never repaid. That debt is still legally payable to anyone who proves to be a surviving member of the Medici family, and Eric believes he can prove exactly that. Although Malone, called in to investigate the bona fides of Ascolani’s enemy Jason Cardinal Richter, has already found a fortune hidden in Richter’s apartment, Richter swears that he’s being framed, and the violent deaths of three anonymous functionaries seem to bear him out. So, Malone forges a series of alliances with Richter, with wealthy businesswoman Camilla Baines, and ultimately with an even more surprising party to prevent Ascolani and Thomas Dewberry, a hired assassin who’s both a sociopath and a devout Catholic, from swaying the upcoming election in return for Eric’s forgiving the ancient debt. An extended closing note shows how inventively Berry mingled history and fiction to weave this tangled web. Readers invested in learning more about the Medicis can be assured that the brief glimpse of them in a prologue set in 1512 is only the beginning.
Perhaps the single most striking feature of this latest dose of intrigue is that its title is intended to be taken literally.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538770566
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
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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