A complex thriller with a cagey "what’d I miss?" conclusion.
A convoluted tale involving a U.S. president who’s a religious fundamentalist, a worldwide "epidemic of hallucinations" and earthquakes that leave no physical damage.
Much of the book's first half establishes elements of Galt’s fragile new world and shadows his theme of unintended consequences. His protagonist, Dr. John Macbeth, is an American-trained psychiatrist at Denmark’s "Copenhagen Cognitive Mapping Project." That enterprise is replicating the human brain in a computer in spite of worries that it might lead to "the Singularity, when technology and artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence." Macbeth has traveled to Boston, his former home, for a conference. While there, he visits with his brother, Casey, who has his own conference to attend soon. He’s scheduled to go to London and a scientific meeting about the "Prometheus Answer…the definitive, elegant solution that solves, once and for all, the way the universe works." Meanwhile, another psychiatrist is called to Camp David to consult with President Elizabeth Yates, who is experiencing visions of past presidents long-dead. Yates is not alone in her supposed delusion. Around the world, bizarre psychic phenomena are unfolding: A French teenager believes she’s watching Joan of Arc’s execution; a Dutch boy observes a Viking raid; a Boston woman experiences a Paleozoic jungle. All this "Temporary Non-Pathological Hallucinatory Syndrome"—"a feeling of inexplicable resonances"—comes with a grocery list of complicated psychiatric and quantum physics terminology and regular references to a mysterious author and his book that is—or isn’t—buried somewhere deep in the Internet. Characters are hard to care about, and narrative threads (the president’s, the Mapping Project originator's, etc.) fall by the wayside. Although offense might be taken because of derogatory references to religion, the intellectual premise and cautionary philosophy in Galt’s complexly plotted novel are worthy subjects. Be prepared for some heavy reading on the hubristic hypothesis that "[s]cience will make us God."
A complex thriller with a cagey "what’d I miss?" conclusion.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-657-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pegasus Crime
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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