This riveting series installment continues to ask if eternal life is worthwhile after all.
A virtual computer whiz hopes that the third time’s a charm as he again faces a vicious family of terrorists in this techno-thriller.
In this third installment of his Sam Sunborn series, Levin has the hero making more hard choices. As the first chapter opens, Sam is pining to his virtual partner, genius Frank Einstein, about needing a physical body again. They had developed “re-instantiation,” which allowed virtual identities to be injected into physical bodies. That technology was stolen by a terrorist called The Leopard, who is also virtual. He may be running a “bodyjacking” operation in Paris. But events dictate that Frank return Sam to a physical form. Rich Little, Michelle Hadar, and Renata Fermi, Sam’s allies at the Department of Homeland Security, need his help in solving a mass attack on the Congressional Black Caucus and a poisoning of everyone at an Indiana grocery store. To solve these crimes, they need to track down The Leopard; his sister, Ashaki; and a cell of White nationalists. Meanwhile, Sam’s wife, Monica, leaves him. Complicating matters for Sam is that parts of the body Frank created for him using quantum objective reduction keep fading in and out. So Sam is greatly challenged while attempting to save both his country and his marriage. Levin certainly wants to create a stir, jamming all sorts of characters and action into this book. He presciently includes a pandemic and updated his manuscript after Covid-19 hit. It’s not essential to have read the previous two entries, Not So Dead (2017) and Not So Gone (2018), but it helps, as many characters in those novels make appearances here. The quick-paced narrative of this installment is primarily a battle of wits between Sam and Ashaki, with The Leopard causing chaos as well. The author’s battle with cancer while writing this thriller informs Sam’s thoughts on his mortality. Sam is forced throughout to choose between personal aims and the public good, and the question is whether he can have it all. The conclusion leaves that answer in doubt, with an opportunity for the series to continue should Levin decide to do so.
This riveting series installment continues to ask if eternal life is worthwhile after all.Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73521-080-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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