An offbeat and unyielding undersea adventure that bubbles with tension.
In Willson’s thriller, set about 30 years in the future, the crew of a highly advanced submarine battles for survival on the ocean floor as the world above teeters on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
The HMS Bancroft’s Capt. Kel Williams knows every inch of the submarine she commands, because she helped design it. This intimate knowledge is put to the test when she and the crew are sent on a mission to the bottom of the Mariana Trench to investigate the presence of an untapped source of biomass, which holds the potential to cure diseases and form the foundation of new crops. Every nation on the war-torn planet wants it, and the Bancroft races to collect it before it falls into the hands of an alliance of Chinese and Russian communists. As villainous pursuers rapidly close in topside, Kel makes a command decision to take the Bancroft deeper into the trench’s vast network of undersea caverns. There, Kel and the crew realize there’s no easy way out. They’re unable to back out the way they entered, and they can’t use a high-powered torpedo to create a new escape route for fear of collapsing the caverns. Out of options, Kel orders the crew to dive even deeper. Willson ratchets up the danger the deeper they go, and as the super-sophisticated Bancroft begins to strain under the enormous pressures, new threats to the crew’s integrity spring up. Close-quarter violence breaks out, described in sometimes-brutal detail. In the prologue, Willson also unexpectedly introduces a pair of celestial entities who oversee and comment on the proceedings, known as “the Builders.” One, named Willow, has a vested interest in the tiny humans fighting for survival at the bottom of the ocean, but her fellow god, Helios, fumes over her steadfast devotion: “What do you see in this pale blue dot of yours?” Will Kel and the Bancroft escape? Will the Builders intervene? Will the planet survive? Willson takes obvious delight in keeping his readers guessing as the novel goes on.
An offbeat and unyielding undersea adventure that bubbles with tension.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781958800126
Page Count: 392
Publisher: WideAsleep Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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