A familiar but sometimes-offbeat SF action thriller complete with a prospectus for good government.
In the future, the remnants of a dictatorship which once ruled the planet use a lab-created virus and planned social unrest to target their enemies in Mitchell’s dystopian SF sequel.
This follow-up continues the story begun in Sundown: Engineering Gives the Devil a Sunburn (2017). In March 2058, Earth is still building back up after the previous year’s overthrow of the World Council, a murderous organization whose vile “supreme leader from hell” Jason Beck ruled via police-state tactics, including assassination and surveillance. Nick Garvey, a no-nonsense veteran police detective in New York City, had joined with President of the United States Lenora Allison, a hands-on leader who doesn’t shy away from a fight, in an investigation that exposed and destroyed the generation-long reign of the World Council. But victory came at a price. Beck is presumed dead, but a new mystery fiend called Ishmael has risen to prominence in what remains of the regrouping World Council. Now, the evildoers resort to bioterror and blackmail, first unleashing a deadly, engineered plague with strategically placed cures. This is just a foretaste of a second, even deadlier pestilence, which comes with a demand from Ishmael for the forces of justice and democracy to surrender. A key target of the World Council’s revenge is the glass-walled showcase community of Friendship City, an amalgam of Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, designed to set an example of model citizenship, racial harmony, and civic responsibility for other nations to try out on their own troubled borders. Garvey, Allison, and other key allies find themselves inside Friendship City, dealing with waves of crime and violence instigated by World Council infiltrators and collaborators as the plague threat looms.
Mitchell relates this tale in short, staccato sentences that are reminiscent of Jack Webb’s narration in the classic cop show Dragnet. Garvey is a similarly familiar type of fearless cop, common in thrillers, who can seemingly shrug off any damage that’s inflicted upon him. However, he is a bit of an unusual player in the action-hero department, as he’s a grandfather whose family spends much of the adventure right alongside him—either willingly or unwillingly; the good guys here have an alarming tendency to suddenly drop their guards and make themselves vulnerable at strategic moments, but, then again, so do the villains. One subplot deals with Garvey’s estranged, now-comatose daughter who hated him for meting out punishment to a scoundrel uncle, which she may or may not remember when she wakes up. Perhaps the biggest payoff here is the “BORO,” or the Bill of Rights with Obligations, reprinted in full in the appendix, which lays out the ground rules for behavior and administration for all residents of Friendship City; it brings the material into line with the work of such SF grandmasters as Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein, who were wont to include civics and social-responsibility instruction in their fictional worlds. The conclusion leaves the door open for another sequel.
A familiar but sometimes-offbeat SF action thriller complete with a prospectus for good government.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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