A dramatically flat and sketchy tale of dueling scientists.
In Boccaletti’s thriller, an American scientist races to fight the spread of a deadly pathogen, unleashed as part of a Chinese conspiracy to establish global hegemony.
In 2006, a team of explorers on an expedition in Mongolia stumble upon a “mysterious, ancient virus” living inside the corpse of a mammoth, preserved within the icy ecosystem of a glacier. Once released, the virus kills every member of the group within a few days, but instead of seeing it as a tragedy, the Chinese government sees it as an opportunity—a “scalable and usable weapon against modern societies.” Wealthy businessman and chemist Dr. Li supervises an official project with the aim of weaponizing the virus, known as K-666; the ultimate purpose is to bring the Western world—and in particular, the United States—to heel, leaving China as the planet’s sole superpower. In terms that are evocative of a comic-book villain, Li explains his aspirations: “The Chinese Dragon, in the end, will have its own paws on the world, and whoever tries to change things will be squashed by the paws’ own weight.” Research is secretly conducted in the hinterlands of the South Gobi Desert, but when 10 shepherds die of the virus, three Russian scientists are called in to investigate, and they soon disappear without a trace. However, one was able to send the investigative data to Dr. Dario Casa, an American virologist working on cutting-edge research for the United States Army. Over the course of this thriller, Boccaletti offers a topical story that includes scenes in Wuhan, China, and displays an impressive level of scientific sophistication in its descriptions. However, the author’s prose style lacks flair; instead, much of the work reads like a white paper, replete with technical charts and maps. Furthermore, it’s a very short work—one that’s well under 150 pages in length—which leaves the author little time to develop authentic characters—most of them instead feel underdeveloped—or a plausible plot. In the end, the book reads less like a novella than notes toward a longer work to be composed in the future.
A dramatically flat and sketchy tale of dueling scientists.Pub Date: March 27, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-72-866508-3
Page Count: 145
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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