A rapid-fire collection that always keeps the reader guessing.
This collection of Globe’s three-book SF thriller series features a tech-savvy protagonist.
Rave Maps is a “private value engineer”—she finds ways for companies to run more efficiently, helping them to “tell stories that drive change.” Running her small firm, Maps Private Value, she’s “never failed and has never let a customer down.” Rave is also skilled in combat; in Book 1, when she is attacked while on a hike in Madeira, she deftly defends herself. The incident presents a question: Why is she being targeted? When Rave and her close friend, Mait Orleans, attend an upscale event in Toronto, they learn that a new AI system called BrainRanger is capable of “uploading the expertise of human minds.” Unfortunately, in the process, it may kill the human whose mind it uploads. Book 2 in the series finds Mait being forced off of a cliff by a driverless car while she is cycling. She survives the attack and later travels to Denver to learn about fire ecology, hoping that perhaps she and Rave can use their skillset to help the planet. In Book 3, Rave ventures to Mars following the death of her nephew due to complications from ingesting a street drug. All three books move quickly—Rave and company are rarely idle. When they are not working, they’re engaged in activities like leading stranded divers to safety or creating a documentary. Along the way, however, there are more business-oriented scenes that are less than scintillating; for one client, Rave “assemble[s] graphs illustrating the monthly cost of a cloud subscription compared with the high cost of building a new data center.” (The assemblage of graphs is not the most dramatic material, but the hero has to make a living.) Rave’s narrative really hits its stride in Book 3, which touches on topics as diverse as drug addiction and a conscious AI, all in fewer than 200 pages. The fun is in never knowing where Rave and her cohorts will end up.
A rapid-fire collection that always keeps the reader guessing.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9798336488210
Page Count: 406
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2025
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
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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