Another clever, energetic addition to an appealing series.
In the 12th installment of this techno-thriller series, a fiendish organization policing online activities targets members of R-Group, a cybersecurity team.
The Special Artificial Intelligence Task Force raids the R-Group’s Zurich operations center. As supercomputers are illegal, the team annihilates the group’s resident AI, ICABOD, and arrests hacker Quip. Once other members of the family-owned R-Group initiate a prison break, they’re fugitives. That doesn’t stop them from stymying the nefarious MAG group, which is spearheading the hits against AI–enhanced supercomputers. They thwart MAG’s attempt to destroy one particular AI, which the R-Group can then secretly utilize to “reassemble” ICABOD. As MAG is already fearful of R-Group’s building another artificial intelligence, they send an anatomic biped programmed to assassinate any remaining members if necessary. They moreover set their sights on Gracie Rodreguiz in New York, suspecting (rightly so) that she’s part of the cybersecurity family. R-Group adamantly avoids detection using ancient devices from last century—pagers. With luck and resolve, the family might be able to revive ICABOD, which they can use in their inevitable confrontation against MAG. Like Breakfield and Burkey’s preceding installment, The Enigma Beyond (2020), their latest novel brims with cool technology. In one instance, the R-Group covertly bounces signals off of still-orbiting, seemingly abandoned zombie satellites. There’s also up-to-date tech that some readers may recognize, including deepfakes. The authors masterfully handle a sizable cast while maintaining momentum. These players, many of whom are recurring, land in various engrossing circumstances; Gracie, for example, finds both peril and romance. Despite returning enemies, this novel could be a stand-alone. But myriad delightful characters mean endless story possibilities for additional sequels or spinoffs.
Another clever, energetic addition to an appealing series. (bibliography, acknowledgements, author bios)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-946858-48-1
Page Count: 340
Publisher: ICABOD Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
