An immensely promising start to a new thriller series.
Opportunity and opprobrium surround a new miracle fruit in the first volume of Butziger’s planned series.
Co-workers Sam, Rory and Martin travel to Uganda to film field content for programming on the highly rated Culinary Network Channel. In a sudden mishap on an adventure tour, Martin plummets down a steep ravine and goes missing for days while the others scramble amid a rainstorm to assemble a rescue crew. Though dazed and injured, Martin manages to stumble upon a grove of exotic fruit trees and, once saved, returns with samples, much to the delight of Andrew, a food technician at the channel who becomes obsessed with growing them locally on Long Island. “Nyoka” fruit, resplendent in its unique hourglass shape, greenish-red color and “umami flavors,” becomes a Manhattan culinary sensation after Andrew touts it to restaurant owner Louis and foresees some serious money in his future. Greed, exclusivity and rampant, aggressive commercialization are all themes brilliantly explored in Butziger’s brisk narrative, as Nyoka’s newfound rejuvenating properties become exploited by all who can get their hands on the miracle fruit. It also threatens Martin and Andrew’s friendship after a suspicious fire destroys Andrew’s greenhouse, where Nyoka is being stockpiled, and he’s forced to return to Africa to retrieve a new supply. Once there, Andrew is met with fierce resistance from the natives trying to preserve their land from outside influences. A local villager reveals the fruit’s true spiritual origins to Andrew as well as its disastrous legacy of inducing a false sense of invincibility. Meanwhile, an increasingly deranged Martin plans to double-cross Andrew by growing Nyoka for himself, but his plan backfires just as a marksman sniper and his band of Ugandan rebel insurgents launch an attack on an American mining operation on their soil. Though the allegorical folklore behind the Ugandan village lore plods along at length and stalls the novel’s momentum, the fiery final confrontation is a captivating end to the first volume of this mystical-thriller series.
An immensely promising start to a new thriller series.Pub Date: July 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499215700
Page Count: 328
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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