An imaginative, immersive, and funny SF mystery.
A fictional detective is brought to life to hunt a serial killer in Chadwick’s comic SF debut.
The year is 4050, and there is a serial killer on the loose. The Family Guy—so called because he murders entire families—is such an elusive and dangerous criminal that the authorities decide the only way to capture him is to build a real-life synthetic investigator designed with the mind and memories of fictional Scotland Yard super-sleuth Miranda “Serial Killer” Miller. “I was a work of fiction, an alloy of various detective tropes,” the synthetic Miller quips about her early 21st-century namesake. “Or a shameless rip-off, depending on who you listened to.” Miranda is dispatched to Las Vegas, England (a facsimile of the American original that now serves as Europe’s party capital) to investigate the latest crime scene. To fit in better with the locals, she has been programed to speak exclusively in IngoLingo, a Clockwork Orange-like “gobspew street-English, spawned by the fads and whims of smin knowed as the Vox Popeye.” In Las Vegas, she teams up with Bogart Wham, the “Numero Uno Celeb Influsser in PopRep” (that’s the Popular Republic, the populist-capitalist federation that now occupies Europe and North America). Together, they will prove whether a detective assembled from middling novels can catch a very real serial killer. According to Chadwick’s inventive lore, Earth was plunged into a 1500-year Dark Age in the middle of the 21st century, and the newly revived civilization of 4050 therefore reveres American culture—and Donald Trump in particular—in the way that Renaissance thinkers revered the Romans; this is the reason “freddykrueger” and Family Guy remain coherent references. (Some still manage to feel dated, however: Common profanities include “zuck”—for Mark Zuckerberg—and “Trump in Stormy!”) Numerous Trump jokes aside—two countries in 4050 are modeled on his teachings, including one called Trumpia—the novel’s premise and its execution are quite brilliant. Readers will end the book hoping more Serial Killer Miller cases are in the works.
An imaginative, immersive, and funny SF mystery.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.
Lt. Eve Dallas is sucked into a murder that may well be overshadowed by another crime—and by the news that Roarke, her billionaire husband, is implicated in both felonies in an unexpected and troubling way.
Disturbed from her sleep, Aileen Carville arises to discover her wealthy husband, Nathan Barrister, coshed to death by a heavy amethyst from the collection of his late father, Zip Global founder Henry J. Barrister. His corpse is lying outside an open vault that everyone in the family insists they hadn’t known about until a couple of months ago, and it’s filled with priceless paintings and sculptures and jewels taken years ago from an A-list of museums, one of which—the Royal Suite, a legendary emerald setting—has evidently been stolen once again. The bombshell revelation that Henry must have commissioned the thefts himself leads to two questions—how did the thief who killed Nathan know about the vault and its contents, and what possessed Nathan’s wealthy father to steal and hide all these goodies in the first place?—that are much more interesting than whodunit, though only one of them will be satisfactorily answered. Another bombshell revelation follows: Roarke’s confession to Dallas that he stole the Royal Suite from London’s Tate Gallery when he was still a teenager, years before he turned away from a life of crime himself. Since Interpol is much more interested in the theft than the murder, there’s a real danger that they’ll decide Roarke was once again the thief. So, Dallas faces the double challenge of solving the crimes and keeping her beloved husband out of the frame.
The heroine’s 62nd appearance is a hit-or-miss mystery best suited for readers already invested in her complicated life.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414526
Page Count: 368
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
© 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.
