A fast-paced, if occasionally buggy, cyberthriller with some nail-biting passages.
In Pausback’s apocalyptic debut thriller, a deadly hacker unleashes a virus that threatens to delete the human species.
Roughly a century in the future, a convergence of wars, disease, and disasters called “the Great Upheaval” kills a third of mankind. As “the corporate elite” takes over for failed governments, survivors dwell in an age of techno-wonders and incipient nightmares. Robots and drones do grunt work, and a global corporation, OmniaR, has created a vast artificial intelligence called BESI (which stands for “bioengineered, synthetic intelligence”). Human teleportation is a reality, and a technique called “remolecularization” has enabled the digital reduction of any matter, including living people, to two-dimensional storage. It allows the easy colonization of planets, but it’s also bad news for poor and genetically undesirable people, who are summarily digitized off the map. One technological innovation, however, is most salient to this book’s plot: every person has an implanted “life chip” that permits constant monitoring by those in power. Soon after rebel hackers attack the corporate paradigm, compromised life chips start infecting people with a synthetic version of the Ebola virus. Top cop Jake Kepler combats a lethal, enigmatic super-hacker called Brimstone and his virtually limitless minions: a commandeered army of security/military robots. Other authors might have relayed this doomsday scenario in a multivolume saga of doorstop-sized tomes (à la Justin Cronin) or skimmed through the mayhem lightly, like a movie-adaptation hired gun. Pausback takes a middle path; sometimes he’s generous with description and dialogue, and other times he’s parsimonious, with billions perishing in a space of a few paragraphs. Characterizations suffer in this uneven mix, with Kepler registering mainly as a Schwarzeneggerian he-man archetype, complete with a cranky superior chewing him out (“Damn it Kepler. Why the hell can’t you just be normal and teleport like the rest of us?!”). But once the narrative properly boots into action mode, it becomes as addictive as a hit video game. Its especially satisfying sequence of endings and epilogues may remind readers of an old computer term: “graceful exit.”
A fast-paced, if occasionally buggy, cyberthriller with some nail-biting passages.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1457534096
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Dog Ear Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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