A ho-hummer about hush-hush bio-weaponry in conspiratorial hands. Beautiful budding microbiologist Stacy Richardson, sitting for the orals that will lock up her Ph.D., gets a horrifying phone call. Her adored husband, she’s told, has taken his own life. Suicide? Not for a nanosecond can Stacy believe such a thing. Max’steadfast, positive in outlook, brilliant (head of the University of Southern California’s microbiology department)—had too much to live for, including luscious Stacy. She zips over to Fort Detrick (Maryland) from USC, on fire to get to the bottom of what she, and every experienced reader, is certain will prove a conspiracy. Max had been at Detrick, on detached service, working on a species of “killer proteins” called Prions. He’d been helping Dr. Dexter DeMille, number-one microbiologist in the field. But to do exactly what? It’s a program overseen by fanatical (diabolical also applies) Admiral James G. Zoll, who hints at basic instability and maybe a touch of substance abuse as the causes of Max’s suicide. He’s hiding something, Stacy intuits, while taking umbrage. Supported by unlikely allies (a burnt-out case of an ex-marine, a lost soul of a Hollywood producer), she launches a relentless investigation. Undercover bio-weaponry is what they’re up to at Fort Detrick, she discovers, a secret attempt to redesign Prions as a special kind of bacteriological agent: smart germs that can tell foe from friend and act accordingly. But the program is thoroughly illegal. Not that this is a matter of much concern to Admiral Zoll, whose patriotism has long since crowded into zealotry and who wants America’s germs to be unsurpassed. So there’s Stacy, willing to die to clear Max’s name, and Admiral Zoll, ready to murder to protect his program. Blood in buckets before resolution. Television veteran Cannell’s fifth subpar thriller (Riding the Snake, 1998, etc.). He did much better work when he was writing The Rockford Files. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16618-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days...
In 1876, professor Edward Cope takes a group of students to the unforgiving American West to hunt for dinosaur fossils, and they make a tremendous discovery.
William Jason Tertullius Johnson, son of a shipbuilder and beneficiary of his father’s largess, isn’t doing very well at Yale when he makes a bet with his archrival (because every young man has one): accompany “the bone professor” Othniel Marsh to the West to dig for dinosaur fossils or pony up $1,000, but Marsh will only let Johnson join if he has a skill they can use. They need a photographer, so Johnson throws himself into the grueling task of learning photography, eventually becoming proficient. When Marsh and the team leave without him, he hitches a ride with another celebrated paleontologist, Marsh’s bitter rival, Edward Cope. Despite warnings about Indian activity, into the Judith badlands they go. It’s a harrowing trip: they weather everything from stampeding buffalo to back-breaking work, but it proves to be worth it after they discover the teeth of what looks to be a giant dinosaur, and it could be the discovery of the century if they can only get them back home safely. When the team gets separated while transporting the bones, Johnson finds himself in Deadwood and must find a way to get the bones home—and stay alive doing it. The manuscript for this novel was discovered in Crichton’s (Pirate Latitudes, 2009, etc.) archives by his wife, Sherri, and predates Jurassic Park (1990), but if readers are looking for the same experience, they may be disappointed: it’s strictly formulaic stuff. Famous folk like the Earp brothers make appearances, and Cope and Marsh, and the feud between them, were very real, although Johnson is the author’s own creation. Crichton takes a sympathetic view of American Indians and their plight, and his appreciation of the American West, and its harsh beauty, is obvious.
Falls short of Crichton’s many blockbusters, but fun reading nonetheless, especially for those interested in the early days of American paleontology.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-247335-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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