Indelible characters will draw readers into this thrilling futuristic yarn.
A bounty hunter and a librarian pursue a group of rebels in a bid to rescue a bureaucrat’s abducted niece in Alexander’s SF adventure, one in a series.
On the planet Offyonder, hundreds of light years from Earth, CenSec (Central Security) enlists Martin Allgeier for a special mission. The “modest” third assistant librarian is an obscure fellow, making him an ideal candidate to track down Claire Montaigne, who’s missing and presumably kidnapped. She’s the niece of the planetary government’s Director and called “the Princess,” a seemingly honorary title. Martin hires a female bounty hunter named Sol to help find Claire. They traverse such Offyonder towns as coal-polluted Bannion (which Martin calls the planet’s “armpit”) and the ominously named Edge-of-the-World. The evasive rebel leader Spartacus and his Spartacists, the likely abductors, aren’t Martin and Sol’s only threat, as Offyonder is rife with crime and corruption. The duo chases down leads and faces off against thuggish types, all in the hope of reaching Claire in time. A full-bodied cast and setting highlights Alexander’s sophomore series installment, which is set in the same universe as Complicated: The Interstellar Life and Times of Saoirse Kenneally (2021). Detailing the rich locales, the author showcases pithy writing, like this description of the stacked buildings in Edge-of-the-World: “Building up was preferable to spreading out, because the presence of people and business brought bandits the way garbage brings rats.” Despite the dense worldbuilding, the story moves at a steady clip and delivers several tense sequences. The mystery element of the narrative is relatively light, as it generally consists of Martin and Sol questioning people and running into various kinds of trouble, but the final act kicks everything up a few notches with surprising turns and an ending that lingers.
Indelible characters will draw readers into this thrilling futuristic yarn.Pub Date: April 8, 2025
ISBN: 9798990585324
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Alton Kremer
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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