Survivalist what-if fiction that satisfyingly sets up a planned dystopian action-drama series.
In Adkins’ novel, a Texas husband, father, and outdoorsman goes on a quest to rescue his daughter from a locked-down university after a mysterious event renders electronics useless.
Middle-aged Rob Anderson is heading toward San Antonio, Texas, on his annual deer-hunting trip when a mysterious “event” causes all electronics, including most motor vehicles, to fail. Communities find themselves cut off from the rest of the world in what Rob correctly intuits is some kind of electromagnetic pulse attack. He quickly foresees supplies running out and society crumbling into violence, banditry, and factionalism; his priority becomes getting to Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and retrieving Ann as soon as possible. Ann’s campus, meanwhile, has been occupied by Homeland Security forces, who restore some electricity via generators and promise a return to normality—if everyone obeys them. “For as long as I can remember, my family has always been very independent and taught me...to think things through and to not just go along with the crowd,” Ann narrates, and soon her dissent makes her a target as she rebels against the overnight takeover. Early on, Rob, who also narrates, denies that he’s a “prepper,” but his actions seem to prove otherwise; he soon turns lethal to defend himself and his loved ones, and although he finds allies with a similar grassroots ethos of family, God, guts, and ammo, he’s dismayed by the killer he becomes. Over the course of this dystopian thriller, Adkins effectively delivers a narrative that’s more akin to a Kevin Costner vehicle than something inspired by the machismo of Rambo: First Blood Part II or Soldier of Fortune magazine; as a result, this yarn is likely to play well for readers of most, if not all, political persuasions. The author’s pacing and handling of suspense is on-target throughout. By the time the open-ended finale rolls around, readers will find that some key questions remain unanswered, but it won’t stop them from waking up at reveille for likely sequels.
Survivalist what-if fiction that satisfyingly sets up a planned dystopian action-drama series.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2024
ISBN: 9798889826958
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Fulton Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.
When their father dies on the cliffs of his California estate, estranged half-siblings unite to investigate possible foul play.
As Dave’s seventh novel opens, the reader learns something the characters don’t know: Hotel magnate Liam Noone did not fall by accident. He was pushed—by whom and for what reason are unclear. The police have deemed it an accident and closed the case, but his son, Sam, is not so sure. Though he hasn’t seen his half sister, Nora, in years, he shows up at her workplace in New York to ask her to go with him to California to investigate. This part of the story is told by Nora in the first person. We get a lot of information about Nora—she has recently lost both parents, she’s an authority on neuroarchitecture, she is engaged to a New York chef but has an ex in the wings—but somehow don’t get much of a feel for her as a person as she and Sam race around investigating leads and having defensive, snappy conversations. A second narrative thread begins 50 years in the past and follows the development of a romance between Liam and a woman named Cory, who is not one of his three ex-wives, nor is she a woman named Cece with whom he had a mysterious connection. The novel relies on the tension created by all these missing puzzle pieces to plunge swiftly forward, but there’s nothing really at stake—no strong suspects, no wrongly accused, no contested inheritance; it’s all just digging up the secrets of a dead person so his children can understand him now that it’s too late. Actually, nobody really understands each other in this book, and as the characters suspiciously keep each other at arm’s length, the effect extends to the reader as well. Other potentially interesting topics—neuroarchitecture (designing spaces that support emotional well-being), the high-end hotel business—are similarly set up but not explored.
A promising blueprint for a book that didn’t quite get written.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668002933
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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