A taut, nuanced medical thriller.
In Wiggins’ novel, a renowned doctor in legal and professional trouble takes a job that calls his notions of bioethics and inheritance into question.
Dr. Bradley Baker is a highly successful Boston surgeon specializing in kidney transplants. His team has developed a game-changing medical advancement—a drug they’re confident that will extend the usefulness of a cadaverous kidney for transplant so that it’s equivalent to one from a living donor. Life has consisted of one success after another for Dr. Baker, and when Sam Kirby, a friend from his past, comes back into his life in need of a gifted kidney surgeon, Brad is all too happy to perform the operation. These procedures are a breeze for Brad—and for the reader, too, as the operating-room scenes are tense and authentic, and informative without being dry: “Time, space, and even Brad’s sense of self disappeared when he was in sync with his work and team….” After Sam’s new kidney begins to “pink up,” Brad leaves the less-demanding post-op work to his junior colleagues. While he’s away from the hospital, Sam suddenly dies from a heart attack. Brad is despondent and his confidence is shaken. Then Sam’s wife, Faye Kirby, sues the hospital, and Brad’s career is thrown into jeopardy. When his boss insists Brad take some time off, the prospect of a year without any salary—while his daughter starts at an expensive university and his wife expects a healthy donation to her charitable work—makes him reconsider a mysterious job offer he's just received during a conference in Mexico.
He’s been specially recruited to lead a team of surgeons working at a state-of-the-art transplant center deep in the heart of the Mexican jungle. It’s a mysterious proposition: The center’s inner workings are secretive, run by a well-dressed man with astoundingly deep pockets, and the accommodations—as well as the compensation—seem too good to be true. As the screws tighten on his professional life back home, Brad capitulates and takes the offer. The new job is exciting at first—readers get to luxuriate, along with the doctor, in his sleek new surroundings, and his custom greenhouse filled with exotic, rare flora—but it soon becomes clear just who Dr. Baker has mixed himself up with, and why the center’s workings have been kept hidden. From there, the narrative becomes even more compelling, and readers will enjoy finding out who does what to whom. Even before this point, though, the work has much to offer. Dr. Baker is a complicated figure, and the delicacy with which he navigates choppy waters both at his old hospital in Boston and his new posting in Mexico helps elevate the novel from run-of-the-mill thriller to something more thoughtful and, in the end, more satisfying. Some characters are types whom readers may recognize—the wealthy, golden-hearted mystery man whose wealth, it turns out, comes from shady dealings, or the no-nonsense cool-under-pressure nurse—but they are drawn so deftly as to feel real.
A taut, nuanced medical thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 339
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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