Has a glowing dragon curled around Las Vegas in the night in this third installment of Grant’s Millennium Quartet, which features the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse as its framing device? In the lackluster opening volume, Symphony (1996), the pale horseman Death descended on the town of Maple Landing and created a host of bizarre effects. In In the Mood (1998), the horseman Famine attacks New Orleans and mass murderers were loosed upon the world. Now the horseman Plague has attacked the world, with only Las Vegas mysteriously free of the super-virulent smallpox mutation killing millions. Outside of Vegas rests the abandoned village of Emerald City, where drifter Travis Falkirk lives for the moment and protects the little sisters Moonbow and Starshine and their mother, Jude. Travis has a beautifully black-painted and polished old pickup truck he calls Chariot, with which—aided by angels—he will right the dragon. Travis also has a magic touch that lets him best slot machines and cover his expenses. As it happens, Las Vegas is off-limits to the plague because the horseman waits there for Travis. Grant’s thought behind this quartet is that the turn of the millennium sponsors weird and paranormal events that emerge from the dark side of man’s nature. If these events were of a more Jungian and archetypal nature, and less a sandstorm of melodrama, they might be more effective. As is, they feel merely hacked out. Many readers will recall Stephen King’s superflu in The Stand, a novel that also came to focus on a supernaturally evil figure in Las Vegas.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-86278-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
None of these minor complications, though, are enough to raise Virgil’s sixth (Shock Wave, 2011, etc.) much above the level...
Virgil Flowers and the forces of Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension battle trigger-happy Bare County Sheriff Lewis Duke in pursuit of a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.
Tom McCall and Becky Welsh think that Jimmy Sharp has led them to Dr. John O’Leary’s home to relieve Marsha O’Leary of a diamond necklace she recently showed off around town. No sooner have they broken in, however, than Jimmy shoots the O’Learys’ oldest daughter, Agatha Murphy, without getting the necklace. In their haste to exit, Jimmy shoots Emmett Williams for his brother-in-law’s Dodge Charger, and their murder spree has begun. First they clear the decks by killing Jimmy’s father and Becky’s parents; then they murder a McDonald’s owner and his wife for some traveling money; then, when a bank robbery goes bad, they kill a Bare County deputy. Called in to the first murder scene, Virgil alertly realizes that Jimmy aimed for the one and only O’Leary window he could easily get through and wonders if Agatha’s murder was something other than a panicky reaction—something like a murder-for-hire arranged by Agatha’s estranged husband, smarmy insurance salesman Dick Murphy. As Virgil, who wants to talk the killers in, tilts with Duke, who wants to shoot them down on sight, Sandford explores the unstable dynamics among the three fugitives and raises questions about how any of the easily identified culprits can ever be brought to justice.
None of these minor complications, though, are enough to raise Virgil’s sixth (Shock Wave, 2011, etc.) much above the level of a highly competent but routine manhunt.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-15770-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
