This propulsive cautionary tale deftly spotlights the clashing elements of technology.
One man’s crusade becomes a nation’s best hope against terrorism in this cyberthriller.
A suicide bombing in Sacramento sets the country on edge. The mastermind behind that attack is Brett Fadi Knouri, aka The Angel, who recruits suicidal older people to become his weapons. The only one aware of The Angel is Kern Hendley, who has secretly set up a system to track potential terrorist activity during his day job as a Medicare fraud analyst at the Secret Service. He’s driven by his fiancee’s death in the Boston Marathon bombing. Word of Kern’s side project slowly leaks out, making his future tenuous. Col. Lippold of the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command is intrigued by Kern’s process. He assigns CIA agent Laura Berbera to recruit Kern for him. Kern and Laura quickly fall into an intense relationship. But after a bombing in Los Angeles, Daryll Hoff, Kern’s imperious supervisor, takes a new interest in the analyst’s project, making his extraction from the Secret Service difficult. Kern and Laura track down a third bomber in Washington, D.C., where she is badly injured attempting to prevent an attack. The Angel’s scheme has a connection to a member of the Saudi royal family, making the terrorist a target of assassins. Meanwhile, Kern must erase his program inside the Secret Service without getting caught. There’s some deep philosophy hidden behind the cat-and-mouse activity among Kern, Laura, and The Angel. Kuechler uses his background in cybersecurity to highlight the vulnerability of personal information in the modern world. Kern’s system works by finding patterns among big data. The author skillfully balances the advantages for national security against how that impinges on personal privacy. He also deserves credit for delivering a cast of complicated characters. Kuechler has two fanatics facing off: Kern, who lost his fiancee, and The Angel, who blames Jews for his father’s death. Both are geniuses who condescend to nearly everyone. Ambitious Laura dumps her fiancé, who can’t understand why her career is more important than he is. Lippold is a well-hidden spy who too often hedges his bets. Then there are bureaucrats everywhere. The author trusts readers to process his multifaceted characters. What results is a complex, thought-provoking story.
This propulsive cautionary tale deftly spotlights the clashing elements of technology.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73556-641-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tonopah Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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