by Alex Ryan ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 10, 2016
A terrific tale for fans of the genre.
A fast-moving, tense biothriller set in China.
Nick Foley is a 28-year-old former Navy SEAL and combat medic who decides that life is “about stewardship, doing something good with the body and mind.” This leads him to do volunteer work on an irrigation project in western China. While he helps dig ditches, a local Uyghur suddenly contracts a horrible disease and dies a grotesque death. Surprisingly to Foley, the illness is not contagious. Soon he’s quarantined and interrogated by the Snow Leopards, a Chinese counterterrorism unit investigating the possibility of bioterrorism. They know about Foley’s past and suspect him of working for the U.S. government. With them is Dr. Chen “Dash” Dazhong, who is, of course, beautiful, of China’s Center for Disease Control. She quickly realizes she can work with Foley to help solve the mystery. Were the disease—if that’s what it is—viral or bacterial, it would trigger an epidemic, but this appears to be targeted. They speculate they’ve witnessed an untraceable weapon being tested in remote China, where supposedly no one cares about the victims. Meanwhile, Maxim Polakov is a Russian spy running a Chinese asset code-named Prizrak. Polakov is very interested in an “entirely new class of weapon” that could kill millions and make him a hero of the new Russia. A number of people die, including a good friend of Dash's. Details aren’t for the squeamish—eyes turn to “gelatinous goo”—but all the violence advances the story. Foley and Dash had better get to the bottom of this menace because it has a 100 percent mortality rate, and the ultimate bad guy says “I am going to turn Beijing red” with his opponents’ blood. An exciting showdown takes place in Beijing’s Underground City, a real Cold War creation of Mao Zedong.
A terrific tale for fans of the genre.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62953-594-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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