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
Layered and grandly operatic in scope and tension.
Four years after a woman allegedly murdered her best friends while sleepwalking, an ambitious London psychologist gets the opportunity to treat her—and to determine, once and for all, her guilt or innocence.
Dr. Benedict Prince, forensic psychologist and sleep specialist, is summoned to a meeting with Dr. Virginia Bloom (his boss at the Abbey Sleep Clinic) and a man from the Ministry of Justice to discuss a recent article in which Ben proposed a possible cure to “resignation syndrome,” which is when a patient enters a deep sleep, often lasting for years, as a way of directly avoiding trauma. The government wants Ben to conduct an experiment on a notorious (alleged) criminal: a young journalist named Anna Ogilvy, aka “Sleeping Beauty,” who’s believed to have murdered two people while sleepwalking, and who hasn’t woken up in the four years since. The government needs Anna awake so she can stand trial for these murders. Ben, of course, has little choice but to agree, and he begins sensory stimulation therapy, believing that if he can connect Anna’s subconscious to happy memories from her childhood, he may be able to wake her. Before she went to sleep, Anna was working to uncover a connection between one of the most notorious English murderers of the 20th century and a secret government experiment called MEDEA. While she might be guilty, Ben realizes that she might also have been a scapegoat for someone else’s murderous rage. And if this shadowy someone has previously killed to protect their secret, Anna’s waking may put her, and Ben, in danger. From the bowels of a notorious psychiatric hospital to a primeval forest to the sun-drenched beaches of Grand Cayman, Blake’s thriller invokes comparisons to Greek tragedies and locked-room mysteries alike, while exploring the additional complicated psychology of sleep and guilt. While this is fully a “whodunit” with an actual solution, it’s even more a “whydunit.” Once you pick it up, there’s no putting it down.
Layered and grandly operatic in scope and tension.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780063314153
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
A female-forward thriller that makes a strong case that smart, unflinching women should run the world.
Letty Davenport seeks to infiltrate a group of freelance hackers in order to thwart their next project—or maybe to help it along.
Ordinary People, an anti-MAGA cabal of lefties, has already pulled off a string of small-scale disruptions, and the word from the CIA is that they plan to take down the power in the Twin Cities, where Letty grew up. Sen. Christopher Colles, the unofficial boss who’s been impressed by Letty’s unflappable skills with weaponry, wants her to pose as the girlfriend of National Security Agency computer specialist Rod Baxter as he seeks to hook up with Ordinary People across the country in California. After their first attempt goes spectacularly wrong, their forces are beefed up by CIA operative Barbara Cartwright and Department of Homeland Security investigator John Kaiser, who worked with Letty in The Investigator (2022), and they succeed in getting close to Craig Sovern, a prominent Ordinary Person who’s already been wreaking havoc on a number of railroad trains and plans to go bigger and bolder. And these aren’t just any trains. Realizing that Ordinary People’s attacks on the hate-fueled social media platform SlapBack may be a sign that their larger operations are providing an important service to the cause of world peace, Letty and her peeps switch from trying to bring down the organization to trying to protect it from the likes of Russian agent Arseny Stepashin and his trusted contractor Tom Boyadjian—all while keeping everything hush-hush. Yeah, right. Sandford alternates brisk action sequences with a steady stream of revelations that make equivocal players and their ambiguous relations even more complicated.
A female-forward thriller that makes a strong case that smart, unflinching women should run the world.Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422410
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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