by Costi Gurgu ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Cartoony action elements don’t blunt the anger of this bracing SF thriller about slavery.
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In a corporate/authoritarian future, a police detective tries to rescue his journalist wife when they are both targeted by a deadly conspiracy to sanction slavery in the United States.
Gurgu opens an SF series based on the potent political premise of a capitalism-yoked, tech-choked Earth of the not-too-distant future embracing slavery as an accepted economic engine. Following eco-collapse, war, and the “Black Crisis” that wrought 80% unemployment, corporations formed their own union to dictate terms most favorable to their survival. In Britain of all places, this notion takes root as institutionalized “servitude.” Whole families with missed debt payments—which encompass almost everyone—can be seized and enslaved. In an America dominated by a monolithic Republican Party, this harsh system is about to be approved under the breathtakingly hypocritical “Freedom Act.” But already, entrepreneurs have broken the law in creating clandestine slave-processing centers (and mass graves). Hard-charging New York City Police Department detective Blake Frye (think Liam Neeson meets Gerard Butler, but tougher) is blissfully married to crusading investigative journalist Amy, whose career derailed when she identified prominent businessman William Wilmot as an underground slave magnate. Wilmot bought her TV network, seeking to dispose of everyone connected to the report. Now, with Amy one of Wilmot’s few surviving enemy-list targets, Frye reluctantly goes to grim, protest-wracked London for a secret rendezvous. It seems even British servitude companies are horrified by the prospect of the lucrative American slave market being monopolized under ruthless Wilmot and want Frye to remove the threat. Upon returning to the “land of the free,” Frye and Amy are imperiled by the corrupt Department of Homeland Customs and Border Security and everyone on Wilmot’s secret payroll. Even with a recursive narrative structure that regularly flashes back to account for how this ordeal came about, the novel keeps the momentum rolling along, and readers will feel chained to what happens next. And lest one wonder how Donald Trump factors into this dystopian vision, Frye ponders that the year 2017 was when everything started going wrong. The author chooses to have Frye afflicted with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a trait that supposedly sharpens his deductive skills. But this portrayal also recalls TV’s whimsical, OCD–ridden crime-buster Adrian Monk, a jarring contrast when pyrotechnics and cliffhangers reminiscent of a 007 spectacle break loose.
Cartoony action elements don’t blunt the anger of this bracing SF thriller about slavery.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Costi Gurgu
by Paul Lynch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 5, 2023
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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by Leif Enger ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2024
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.
Amid the dystopian collapse of the near future, a musician embarks on a quixotic voyage from the shore of Lake Superior.
There’s both a playfulness and a seriousness of purpose to the latest from the Minnesota novelist, a spirit of whimsy that keeps hope flickering even in times of darkest despair. Things have gone dangerously dark along the North Shore, and likely for the country as a whole. A comet is coming that augurs ill, a pandemic has wreaked havoc with the public health, an autocratic despot and raging populism have made books and booksellers all but treasonous. There are corpses floating in the lake from climate change, and there are numerous instances of people swallowing something that kills them; the dead are generally considered seekers of whatever comes next (which has to be better than this) rather than suicides. As narrator Rainy sets the scene, “The world was so old and exhausted that many now saw it as a dying great-grand on a surgical table, body decaying from use and neglect, mind fading down to a glow.” Rainy is a bass player in bar bands, a jack of a variety of trades, and devoted husband to Lark, a bibliophile who runs the local bookstore. Before the collapse of the publishing industry, a cult author had been set to publish a volume with the same title as this novel, and finding one of the few advance copies has been like a holy grail for Lark. Then a copy finds her, courtesy of a fugitive pursued by the powers that be, and whatever tranquility Lark and Rainy had achieved is shattered. Rainy takes to the lake to escape the fugitive’s pursuers and reunite with Lark. He experiences a variety of hardship, challenge, and adventure, yet somehow lives to tell the tale that is this novel.
The novel’s voice remains engaging, and its spirit resilient, against some staggeringly tough times.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780802162939
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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