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ONE SECOND PER SECOND

Original touches and a misanthropic protagonist keep this clever time-travel tale ticking along nicely.

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In Unwin’s SF debut, a troubleshooter for a secret, time-traveling agency visits three different eras in pursuit of someone meddling with the American Revolution.

Joad Bevan is a jaded member of the Time Management Agency, a top-secret government group in Washington state whose operatives work to detect and counteract rogue time travelers. Journeying through time and space can be achieved with modest-scale, exotic chemical reactions, discovered in the 1980s, that generate tachyons (faster-than-light particles). The TMA, fortunately, has the resources to prevent any upstart “time vandal” from disrupting the natural, chronological order of things. Joad must pretend that he’s merely doing arcane, cutting-edge scientific research to keep his winemaker wife, Bess, in the dark. Despite the secrecy, the protagonist finds his workplace dreary and rather absurd—existentially, psychologically, and logically. Then a massive tachyon strike on the TMA complex leaves the base shattered, with the rest of the staff cast back centuries to Colonial North America, and Joad finds himself in an altered landscape. He takes an emergency jump back to the early TMA of 1996 and discovers—in addition to a more positive office environment and a potential new love interest—that one of the agency’s own employees has turned against TMA and is meddling with historical events in 1777 Pennsylvania. Joad’s attempted rescue mission, however, opens up a maze of time paradoxes. Over the course of the novel, Unwin seems to have had quite a lot of fun engineering the plot’s Mobius strip twists and turns and philosophizing a bit about the elasticity of time and the universe (and yes, Doctor Who fans, there is a TARDIS joke). The grumbling hero would be the first to admit that a great deal of his story makes little sense in a straightforward way, and his refreshing attitude helps wind the mainspring of an SF subgenre that’s grown a bit lax from overuse. If Michael Crichton’s 1999 novel Timeline had starred as astringent a lead character as Joad, maybe its 2003 movie adaptation would have been better.

Original touches and a misanthropic protagonist keep this clever time-travel tale ticking along nicely.

Pub Date: April 24, 2021

ISBN: 979-8-71-537894-1

Page Count: 218

Publisher: Self

Review Posted Online: July 22, 2021

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SWAN SONG

Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”

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A stranger comes to town, and a beloved storyteller plays this creative-writing standby for all it’s worth.

Hilderbrand fans, a vast and devoted legion, will remember Blond Sharon, the notorious island gossip. In what is purportedly the last of the Nantucket novels, Blond Sharon decides to pursue her lifelong dream of fiction writing. In the collective opinion of the island—aka the “cobblestone telegraph”—she’s qualified. “Well, we think, she’s certainly demonstrated her keen interest in other people’s stories, the seedier and more salacious, the better.” Blond Sharon’s first assignment in her online creative writing class is to create a two-person character study, and Hilderbrand has her write up the two who arrive on the ferry in an opening scene of the book, using the same descriptors Hilderbrand has. Amusingly, the class is totally unimpressed. “‘I found it predictable,’ Willow said. ‘Like maybe Sharon used ChatGPT with the prompt “Write a character study about two women getting off the ferry, one prep and one punk.”’” Blond Sharon abandons these characters, but Hilderbrand thankfully does not. They are Kacy Kapenash, daughter of retiring police chief Ed Kapenash (the other swan song referred to by the title), and her new friend Coco Coyle, who has given up her bartending job in the Virgin Islands to become a “personal concierge” for the other strangers-who-have-come-to-town. These are the Richardsons, Bull and Leslee, a wild and wealthy couple who have purchased a $22 million beachfront property and plan to take Nantucket by storm. As the book opens, their house has burned down during an end-of-summer party on their yacht, and Coco is missing, feared both responsible for the fire and dead. Though it’s the last weekend of his tenure, Chief Ed refuses to let the incoming chief, Zara Washington, take this one over. The investigation goes forward in parallel with a review of the summer’s intrigues, love affairs, and festivities. Whatever else you can say about Leslee Richardson, she knows how to throw a party, and Hilderbrand is just the writer to design her invitations, menus, themes, playlists, and outfits. And that hot tub!

Though Hilderbrand threatens to kill all our darlings with this last laugh, her acknowledgments say it’s just “for now.”

Pub Date: June 11, 2024

ISBN: 9780316258876

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024

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THE WOMEN

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

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A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

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