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
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
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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