A haunting, engaging dystopian whodunit infused with qualities of classic crime noir.
In this futuristic mystery, a detective investigates the death of a woman who recently miscarried an illegal pregnancy in a world where a eugenics-type program limits who can give birth.
Detective Cooper-Clark, working on a contract basis for “Citi” police, lives in a society where men are “snipped pre-birth.” They must qualify for the “Life Program,” administered by a company called Gencom, to become fertile again and get a female partner to have sex and breed with. There is “a lot of anger at the Program,” muses Coop, with women typically more sexual since they remain fertile. But they have to apply to the Program if they want to get pregnant legally. Coop gets assigned the case of the brutal sexual assault and murder of Viki Dotti Jansdottir, 22, a “red dirt girl” from “the Banleus, the desiccated post-urban sprawl outside the Citi.” Viki recently miscarried an illegal pregnancy, which had caused strife with her musician boyfriend, Seth, who is not in the Program and thus a “certified infert.” Coop follows various clues, including the “bio trace” found on Viki’s body, and feels glimmers of a mutual attraction with Lyse, a soon-to-be college student who recently joined Seth’s band. Eventually, Coop discovers the “social dynamite” that drove a “terrorist” to kill Viki. Lupton’s novel is a cleverly crafted realization of how, as Coop notes, “plans that require humans to do what the modellers predict” tend to run amok. The narrative effectively weaves in and out of several characters’ perspectives, keeping Coop (and readers) off-kilter in determining the murderer. The book highlights the dangers of genomic sexual engineering and perhaps environmental destruction given that the Banleus has “relentless dust and the remorseless advance of the insects.” Holding readers’ interest throughout is Coop, who in his youth “sought out vintage detective stories in any shape or form he could find” and serves as a wry Raymond Chandler–esque commentator on this strange world.
A haunting, engaging dystopian whodunit infused with qualities of classic crime noir.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781913913878
Page Count: 304
Publisher: The Book Guild Ltd
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.
Murder and a host of lesser but more time-consuming complications dog the production of costumer Joey Jessop’s latest film project.
An unknown woman running from a restaurant is struck and killed by a silver Lexus SUV. It’s a painful moment for everyone involved, but especially for Joey, who’d seen the woman dragged and chased out of the restaurant kitchen minutes earlier by a cook and another menacing man and hadn’t said anything about it. Tyrone Thomas, the head of the studio producing The Golden Age, which is filming nearby, is less interested in encouraging his crew to cooperate with the police than in making sure no whiff of bad publicity touches his stars. And so much intrigue swirls around leading lady Gillian Best—from her quarrel with personal assistant Rita Ranucci to her hush-hush exchange with personal manager Dan Lomax to her unpublicized relationship with personal videographer Armand Dubois—that keeping it all under wraps is likely to be a full-time job. But not for Joey, whose full-time job, once costume designer Gregory Bentham is called back to England by his husband’s illness and the production’s deal with boutique Italian costume manufacturer Bergati falls through, is arranging for the last-minute design and construction of hundreds of World War I–era costumes for a movie whose story McCown, intent on the worm’s-eye view, never bothers to share. Another violent death will provide a sop to genre fans, but this is really a relentlessly detailed account of the thousands of obstacles to producing a movie.
Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781639106646
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crooked Lane
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.
A novelist tries to adapt to her ever changing reality as her world slowly disappears.
Renowned Japanese author Ogawa (Revenge, 2013, etc.) opens her latest novel with what at first sounds like a sinister fairy tale told by a nameless mother to a nameless daughter: “Long ago, before you were born, there were many more things here…transparent things, fragrant things…fluttery ones, bright ones….It’s a shame that the people who live here haven’t been able to hold such marvelous things in their hearts and minds, but that’s just the way it is on this island.” But rather than a twisted bedtime story, this depiction captures the realities of life on the narrator's unnamed island. The small population awakens some mornings with all knowledge of objects as mundane as stamps, valuable as emeralds, omnipresent as birds, or delightful as roses missing from their minds. They then proceed to discard all physical traces of the idea that has disappeared—often burning the lifeless ones and releasing the natural ones to the elements. The authoritarian Memory Police oversee this process of loss and elimination. Viewing “anything that fails to vanish when they say it should [as] inconceivable,” they drop into homes for inspections, seizing objects and rounding up anyone who refuses—or is simply unable—to follow the rules. Although, at the outset, the plot feels quite Orwellian, Ogawa employs a quiet, poetic prose to capture the diverse (and often unexpected) emotions of the people left behind rather than of those tormented and imprisoned by brutal authorities. Small acts of rebellion—as modest as a birthday party—do not come out of a commitment to a greater cause but instead originate from her characters’ kinship with one another. Technical details about the disappearances remain intentionally vague. The author instead stays close to her protagonist’s emotions and the disorientation she and her neighbors struggle with each day. Passages from the narrator’s developing novel also offer fascinating glimpses into the way the changing world affects her unconscious mind.
A quiet tale that considers the way small, human connections can disrupt the callous powers of authority.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-87060-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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