A clever, complex techno-puzzle with authentic characters and a tight, smartly arranged setup.
A tech firm revives long-deceased historical geniuses for nefarious purposes in Unwin’s futuristic thriller.
Physicist Dr. Art Cornysh has been summoned from Tennessee to Seattle to interview with the Robin Hood–themed Locksley capital markets company, a firm that doesn’t specialize in anything he’s good at or trained in. Art’s life partner, Thea, a math teacher, revels in the opportunity, but Art is skeptical of the offer. At a lavish party, aggressive grooming by a mysterious executive works its magic, and Art finally gives in and accepts their offer. But things in the company start unraveling immediately: When employee Roxanne “Rox” Wells starts toying with facial recognition software and uncovers stunning evidence that Locksley has been cloning historical geniuses, she is abruptly terminated. Rox and co-worker Peter “Bunny” Bunsen team with Art to examine digital side-by-side comparisons of employees (themselves included) whose appearances resemble those of younger versions of “magni” geniuses Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, and others. Together, they must decipher the manipulations conducted for years by Locksley’s CEO, David Maduro, who is taking the business over from his father—whose plan was to regenerate a series of “great minds” from history to build the beginnings of a “master race.” In a nasty, lethal battle of wits and strategic maneuvering, Rox, Bunny, and Art work tirelessly to expose the Maduro family’s scheme to extract DNA samples from the graves of the greatest intellects of all time. The author keeps the chapters briskly clipped, which adds to the suspense factor in this futuristic, high-tech tale of double-crossing duplicates (“with the arm that had been wrapped around her, she’s swept up by the crook of her legs and carried toward the banister. The frenzy of her limbs accelerates as she’s taken, feet first, toward a ten-story plunge”). A final showdown pitting brilliant minds of the past against contemporary thinkers makes for a memorable climax.
A clever, complex techno-puzzle with authentic characters and a tight, smartly arranged setup.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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