A fast-paced, violent yarn whose action sequences are sure to keep readers turning the pages.
Cooke and Ryan’s SF thriller follows an orphaned young girl roped into a violent underworld.
In the year 3989, Sook Joo begins her teen years living at an orphanage with her grandfather Ryu, a village surgeon and master practitioner of Orikido, an ancient form of martial arts that uses traditional techniques and locally fabricated steel weapons. When the gentle peace of the orphanage is broken by a group of “Slängers”—a notorious gang of enforcers for the underworld boss, Quan—Ryu is killed defending his home. Sook Joo is separated from her pseudo-sibling, Futotta, and sent to live with her Uncle Hai, himself a degenerate who allows Sook Joo to be raped to pay off a debt. She’s then kidnapped by a human trafficking ring and selected by the mysterious Cho, who will deliver her to her ultimate fate: to be interred aboard a nightmare ship where passenger-slaves are made to fight each other, often to the death. Though she did nothing to deserve such a punishment, Sook Joo is well equipped to survive it, given her experience in Orikido, and as she fights to stay alive, she plots her revenge against the powerful, sinister forces led by Quan. Cooke and Ryan’s gripping novel takes place in a world not entirely different from our own, despite being set nearly 2,000 years in the future. The setting is an intriguing reality in which 21st-century technology (and its imagined advances) mingles effectively with the old-world ways of life concerning loyalty, honor, and martial arts. The combat scenes are well drawn, especially when the opponents are mismatched: “Sook Joo kicked her in the groin, threw a sharp punch to her nose, and again cast her to the ground. Tòa, half-blinded with blood and tears, leapt up and took a series of wild swings. She’d clearly had no training. She was a farm girl or street orphan, nothing more.” While Cooke and Ryan may not be breaking new ground, they’ve delivered an entertaining, action-packed revenge tale.
A fast-paced, violent yarn whose action sequences are sure to keep readers turning the pages.Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781972585016
Page Count: 212
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.
The world as we know it ended in Wanderers, Wendig’s 2019 bestseller. Now what?
A sequel to a pandemic novel written during an actual pandemic sounds pretty intense, and this one doesn’t disappoint, heightened by its author’s deft narrative skills, killer cliffhangers, and a not inconsiderable amount of bloodletting. To recap: A plague called White Mask decimated humanity, with a relative handful saved by a powerful AI called Black Swan that herded this hypnotized flock to Ouray, Colorado. Among the survivors are Benji Ray, a scientist formerly with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Shana Stewart, who is pregnant and the reluctant custodian of the evolving AI (via nanobots, natch); Sheriff Marcy Reyes; and pastor Matthew Bird. In Middle America, President Ed Creel, a murdering, bigoted, bullying Trump clone, raises his own army of scumbags to fight what remains of the culture wars. When Black Swan kidnaps Shana’s child, she and Benji set off on another cross-country quest to find a way to save him. On their way to CDC headquarters, they pick up hilariously foulmouthed rock god Pete Corley, back from delivering Willie Nelson’s guitar to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. This novel is an overflowing font of treasures peppered with more than a few pointed barbs for any Christofacists or Nazis who might have wandered in by accident. Where Wanderers was about flight in the face of menace, this is an old-fashioned quest with a small band of noble heroes trying to save the world while a would-be tyrant gathers his forces. All those big beats, not least a cataclysmic showdown in Atlanta, are tempered by the book’s more intimate struggles, from Shana’s primal instinct to recover her boy to the grief Pete buries beneath levity to Matthew Bird’s near-constant grapple with guilt. It’s a lot to take in, but Pete’s ribald, bombastic humor as well as funny interstitials and epigraphs temper the horror within.
IMAX-scale bleeding-edge techno-horror from a writer with a freshly sharpened scalpel and time on his hands.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-15877-7
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2022
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