The sort of page-turner whose over-the-top plot and self-awareness make it all the more fun.
A researcher on the brink of a breakthrough begins work at a big pharma firm only to discover that his fears about the company's morals are totally founded.
Medical researcher and physician Frank Garfield is onto something. His work with telomeres shows promise in extending life beyond its normal bounds, though only his rats have reaped the benefits thus far. His research could benefit the child cancer patients he sees at Boston’s St Mary’s Children’s Hospital, but his mentor, Jackson Atlas, is concerned that the technology could be exploited by bad actors as a genetic Botox. But when Atlas is shot dead in his home, he can't protect Frank from the forces he designated the “pimps and whores” of the epigenetic world, and soon Leona Lang and her son, Dalton, corner Frank into working for UNICO Pharmaceuticals. Frank’s a good guy through and through, and the promise of a fast turnaround time for his child cancer patients convinces him to continue his work out of the company’s Litchfield lab, but he’s skeptical about what the Langs really want. Detective Sean Brody, who’s assigned to the Atlas murder, feels an immediate connection to Frank, and they start dating once Frank is cleared of Atlas' murder, though Sean doesn’t like the idea that the guy he’s seeing is doing shady research for a private company with too much money. When Dalton promises Frank he’ll do anything it takes to get his cooperation, the anything is such a clear echo of Atlas’ warning about pimps and whores that it puts Frank on high alert. As the drug trials show promise, the Langs each develop secret plans to get the magic drug recipe for themselves, resulting in a fast-paced backstab-a-thon targeting Frank and all those closest to him.
The sort of page-turner whose over-the-top plot and self-awareness make it all the more fun.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-7278-9050-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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