A twisty SF mystery that weaves together intriguing futuristic concepts with a classic crime-noir feel.
Curbo’s SF thriller finds a young man waking from a coma only to be thrown into the middle of a missing-persons mystery.
In an unspecified future San Francisco, Simon Silibus, a “caretaker of friends,” has christened a comatose associate with a new name: Ryger Deacon. A fugitive from the law, Simon must keep his friend safe as he undergoes “the change”—a method of life extension that returns a person’s DNA to a younger state. Waking up with coma-induced amnesia, Ryger struggles to remember his past even as he’s informed that he is a private investigator and given a new task by Maggie O’Die, the wealthy, elderly owner of All-Bio, the company responsible for life extension technology. Ryger is directed to find Maggie’s missing husband, Sam, and her granddaughter, Cara, who is next in line to inherit Maggie’s fortune. As Ryger attempts to piece together his past, he must navigate company politics and the constant threat of “Trackers,” a cryptic and deadly group that targets anyone pursuing unregulated life extension. When Maggie herself goes missing, and a mysterious girl shows up who may or may not be the real Cara, Ryger must use all the futuristic tools at his disposal—including a memory-stimulating pearl—to crack the case. In this ambitiously intricate novel, the author manages to mostly hang onto the various plot threads. At times, particularly when discussing the Trackers, “mystery” strays into “vagueness,” but the open-endedness of the novel’s conclusion indicates this may be intentional. Clean writing and brisk action keep things moving forward as Curbo shares thoughtful insights into the nature of humanity in the face of its future and its past: “We exist in a world of connections to other people. As we grow old, our connections stretch and thin. We look for familiar faces in every new place we go. We see these new people in the light of people we once knew.”
A twisty SF mystery that weaves together intriguing futuristic concepts with a classic crime-noir feel.Pub Date: June 11, 2023
ISBN: 979-8395822581
Page Count: 273
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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 2026 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.
