An often diverting sci-fi tale for fans of traditional superheroes, with just the right amount of real-world drama.
In Garwin’s debut thriller, an ordinary group of civilians find themselves acting as superheroes in a serious battle against governmental corruption.
In 2025, Northern California, or Norcal, is the site of the “Great Experiment,” in which participating citizens live in a heavily monitored area with its own Internet known as “the grid.” There, the government tests various programs in trial runs. It’s also there that San Francisco business attorney Chance sometimes dons a mask and fedora and subverts cab thieves as Cabman; he joins forces with Privilege Woman (aka Sarah) and Cellman (aka Chris). They were inspired to pursue superheroics by a journalist’s articles, which also supplied their team’s name: Gosh, or Group of Ordinary Superheroes. Soon an unscrupulous Washington lawyer, Roger Littleford, spurs the group into more dangerous territory when he targets an auditor, Alex, whose investigation threatens his power. Chance and the others decide to protect Alex, who may be hiding something from her rescuers. Much of the story’s charm comes from its familiarity, as the powerless superheroes have relevant objectives; Sarah goes after a greedy college professor, for example, and Chris snatches cellphones from impolite talkers and texters. Likewise, in spite of the sci-fi title and setting, Norcal is also instantly recognizable: The residents, affixed with wirelessly linked contact lenses and injected with computer chips, suffer a lack of privacy, just as people today are at the mercy of GPS and social networking. The heroes are intriguing not only for their strengths (Wynn Warburton, a former Navy SEAL, trains them in Japanese martial arts and weapons), but also for their flaws (Chris bases his decisions on whatever Chance decides). That said, the predictable romance between Chance and Alex offers no surprises. Littleford, meanwhile, is a drolly transparent villain; he names his company Smug after someone uses that word to describe him, and the vile manner in which he obtains an alternate energy source will incite most readers’ ire. Garwin also transforms his tongue-in-cheek story into a grimmer tale with skilled ease; just because Gosh strives to avoid violence, it doesn’t mean that its members always do so, and it certainly doesn’t defend them from potentially fatal encounters.
An often diverting sci-fi tale for fans of traditional superheroes, with just the right amount of real-world drama.Pub Date: July 31, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500444389
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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