This used to be labeled “cyberpunk.” Some believe it’ll be called “real life,” sooner or later.
Even in a future world where both landscapes and personal identities are way too fluid, murders still happen, and their solutions must be found. No matter what (or who) is damaged along the way.
Never mind the exact year. All you need to know is that sometime in the future, coastal cities like Los Angeles are all but halfway submerged in water and there has been so much war in the interim that it’s hard to know who won or lost. Still, people adapt to change as they always have and Orr Vue, a grizzled, sardonic retired soldier and professional “fact checker” for a powerful data-collecting company called InfoDrip, insists on living as quiet a SoCal life as super-stressed socio-environmental circumstances permit. Somehow, there’s always LAPD around, and they pick up Orr for questioning about the murder of his employer, Thomas Mahoney. Orr’s not a suspect, but Auggie Wolf, his fellow war vet and one-time lover, is being held for interrogation. Even though the cops are sure they have their man, they allow Orr to dig further into the case using his facility with piercing through foggy deceptions with factoids—and with wielding surplus military drones. Also interested in using Orr’s detecting skills is Mahoney’s daughter, Marianna, enigmatic and, of course, beautiful, though the old soldier isn’t satisfied with using that mere adjective: “[She] had a body that hit my eyes harder than tear gas, lit up my nervous system like a dozen Tasers, made my heart pound harder than a panic attack, and took my breath away like a week of water-boarding…I wanted to tell her secrets until I ran out of them, and then make some up just to keep on talking.” That sentence should give you some idea of how O’Brien keeps your head in the action with antic, lyrical wit and vivid—if sometimes bewildering—action scenes as Orr’s search for Mahoney’s killer becomes more brutally complex. It all works out in extremely weird, perversely satisfying ways.
This used to be labeled “cyberpunk.” Some believe it’ll be called “real life,” sooner or later.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593687284
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.
A young Navarrian woman faces even greater challenges in her second year at dragon-riding school.
Violet Sorrengail did all the normal things one would do as a first-year student at Basgiath War College: made new friends, fell in love, and survived multiple assassination attempts. She was also the first rider to ever bond with two dragons: Tairn, a powerful black dragon with a distinguished battle history, and Andarna, a baby dragon too young to carry a rider. At the end of Fourth Wing (2023), Violet and her lover, Xaden Riorson, discovered that Navarre is under attack from wyvern, evil two-legged dragons, and venin, soulless monsters that harvest energy from the ground. Navarrians had always been told that these were monsters of legend and myth, not real creatures dangerously close to breaking through Navarre’s wards and attacking civilian populations. In this overly long sequel, Violet, Xaden, and their dragons are determined to find a way to protect Navarre, despite the fact that the army and government hid the truth about these creatures. Due to the machinations of several traitorous instructors at Basgiath, Xaden and Violet are separated for most of the book—he’s stationed at a distant outpost, leaving her to handle the treacherous, cutthroat world of the war college on her own. Violet is repeatedly threatened by her new vice commandant, a brutal man who wants to silence her. Although Violet and her dragons continue to model extreme bravery, the novel feels repetitive and more than a little sloppy, leaving obvious questions about the world unanswered. The book is full of action and just as full of plot holes, including scenes that are illogical or disconnected from the main narrative. Secondary characters are ignored until a scene requires them to assist Violet or to be killed in the endless violence that plagues their school.
Unrelenting, and not in a good way.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9781649374172
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Red Tower
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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