While this story makes effective use of the dark side of technology, it lacks memorable human sentiments.
A technological thriller focuses on a murky internet deal gone bad.
Jacob Costa believes his ex-wife, Simone Johns, has been dead for three days when he receives a text from her. The message is simple if troubling: Simone has been murdered, and Jacob needs to protect their son. She was a technological wizard who had been involved with elements of the “dark web”: the seedier sections of the internet, “where real sales happen and where everything is for sale.” Naturally, Simone kept her involvement in such affairs secret, and by all outward appearances, she spent her time contributing to the success of her educational software company, Safehaven. That Jacob has a son at all is news to him, particularly now that, with the death of Simone, the boy will be “sole heir to a multi-million-dollar company.” Jacob travels to Orlando, Florida, with his fiancee, the computer savvy and curvy Isabella Nunez, and their pit bull, Justice, to attempt to get things sorted out. In Orlando, Jacob meets his 8-year-old son, David, who is under the care of a friendly lawyer in a gated community called Sanctuary. David’s life is in danger, however, as it seems $85 million has gone missing from a project Simone was involved in. Will Jacob make sense of it all before it is too late? Bishop (Only a Woman Could…and She Did, 2017) skillfully shows the inherent dangers involved in the modern-day reliance on computers. Fiddling with systems that people take for granted—from landing airplanes to locking doors—can have vivid and severe consequences. But the characters involved in the narrative manage to be less distinctive than the machines they control. Where the prose should be edgy with its depictions of shady figures, it often becomes muddled. This is the case with a description of Simone and how “she wanted the big win, to be in the driver’s seat and she played in a pond where there were bigger sharks than her.” With such blunt portrayals, readers may be left with the impression that the main players are more akin to lines of code serving their functions than humans worth caring about.
While this story makes effective use of the dark side of technology, it lacks memorable human sentiments.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 201
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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