A derivative but well-crafted and engaging bioweapon tale.
A banker investigates his father’s suspicious death and stumbles on a terrorist conspiracy in this debut novel.
David Blum, a 38-year-old senior adviser at Regency Bank, receives devastating news: His father, Solomon, a professor of political science, has just died of a heart attack. David rushes to his hometown, Champaign, Illinois, and receives an alarming note from a stranger, Hans Meier, who claims to have information about the true nature of Solomon’s death. Hans arranges a meeting with David but never shows up. In fact, Hans—a graduate student and an admirer of Solomon—seems to have disappeared. In addition, the student’s home has been searched. David, a former FBI agent, decides to conduct an investigation of his own and finds a cryptic note in Hans’ handwriting that appears to anticipate the intentional unleashing of some kind of epidemic. Generating considerable suspense and enough plausibility for a novelistic version of a big-budget movie, the story details David’s race to thwart a biomedical act of terrorism by an insane agricultural scientist, Otto Feldmann. David tracks down a woman, Kay Westfield, who 20 years earlier inadvertently witnessed Feldmann supervise a bizarre experiment that involved an exploding plane, poison gas, and rapidly dying animals. Jacobs’ plot hurtles along at an agreeably swift pace, never lagging, always delivering a steady stream of easily digestible entertainment. The tale is a very familiar one, even formulaic, and Feldmann, a “consummate soulless scientist—all brain and no heart,” is an unreconstructed type, a kind of barely personified cliché. But the book’s strengths are neither depth nor originality, but rather taut, lucidly described drama and a magnetic leading man. For readers with the proper expectations, this novel provides an enjoyable way to spend a leisurely afternoon.
A derivative but well-crafted and engaging bioweapon tale.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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