Brisk and efficiently engrossing, and as substantial as bubbles.
Second part of an alien-contact trilogy, following Heaven's Shadow (2011), the brainchild of Hollywood A-listers Goyer (Batman Begins, Dark City, etc.) and Cassutt (Stargate SG-1, Max Headroom, etc.).
In 2019, two competing space missions landed on Keanu, which turned out to be a vast alien vessel. Despite their advanced science, Keanu’s Architects have a problem they can’t solve and need humanity’s help. Neither of these expeditions made much headway, so the Architects snatched up a random selection of people from their respective mission HQs (in Houston and Bangalore) and deposited them in Keanu to join marooned NASA mission commander Zack Stewart. So they must learn how to survive here and explore their surroundings in the hope of learning why they’ve been summoned. There are some complications: Some of those killed in the previous book don’t stay dead, but return as “revenants” with a mental hotline to the Architects; and an alien, the Prisoner, trapped for hundreds of years, escapes and encounters one of the human exploring teams—but his motives are unclear. The action-adventure sequences, as the various exploring teams blunder from cliffhanger to cliffhanger, keep the pages turning at a good clip. And the rest, plot absurdities notwithstanding, would be far more likable if it had been less obviously designed for future movie-dom, with sound-stage interiors, screenplay-crisp dialogue, a steady drip-drip of revelations, the ticking clock (Keanu is departing for parts unknown), the occasional death and the teams selected for wide appeal from such stock characters as the young girl (Zack’s daughter), the dog (a revenant), the crippled ex-astronaut, the dying black guy, the Chinese spy, the science fiction writer, the Indian guru, etc.
Brisk and efficiently engrossing, and as substantial as bubbles.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-441-02092-8
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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