A witty and refreshingly original political drama.
Two lawyers attempt to overturn Obamacare on spiritual grounds in this debut novel.
Jerry Riggs is chief counsel to the speaker of the House and, as a Republican, is exasperated with his party’s failure to effectively oppose Obamacare. He’s especially angry at the GOP’s hypocritical complicity: Senate Minority Leader Mack McCormick openly criticized the Affordable Health Care Act but simultaneously ensured its protection from legislative assault in deference to his close ties to the health care industry. But an unusual opportunity to attack Obamacare surfaces when Sebastian Vogel, an old law school classmate of Jerry’s, files a suit against the federal government, requesting a religious exemption from the act’s individual mandate. His argument is a strikingly odd one, not premised on any adherence to institutional religion but instead on a general spirituality that interprets sickness and health as states of consciousness rather than medical conditions: “We’ve mapped out the DNA and found that it doesn’t explain everything….Could that be because there’s a spiritual aspect to disease?” Jerry reluctantly teams up with Vogel—his New-Age conversion strikes the chief counsel as incoherent at first—because he sees a real possibility to strike a blow at an otherwise impregnable law. But when Vogel’s home is set on fire by an arsonist, the stakes become perilously clear—a billion-dollar industry has taken notice and is prepared to kill to protect its profits. Meanwhile, Jerry struggles with his own mounting health problems—overweight and underexercised, he’s developed a serious heart condition that requires surgery, precisely the circumstances that led to his father’s death. Wright inventively combines political intrigue, humor, and philosophical meditation in an unusually policy-wonkish thriller. The author certainly stretches the outer limits of plausibility—and readers’ credulity—but in a way artful enough that the plot never descends into outright absurdity. Vogel’s form of spirituality can be irksomely enigmatic, but he still delivers some memorable insights. The whole narrative is a kind of conservative fantasy—a spiritually inspired but legitimate way to topple Obamacare—so it’s possible those readers unsympathetic to the Republican cause will find it tough to be sensitive to Jerry’s plight.
A witty and refreshingly original political drama.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5030-3389-4
Page Count: 422
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
