An intriguing medical tale hampered by uneven prose.
An SF thriller focuses on a world where clones thrive and a new vaccine promises possible immortality.
Dr. Avicenna “Avit” Arceneaux is a young pathologist working on the Panacea vaccine, which will be distributed worldwide. As the rollout is about to start, Arceneaux and his assistant, Mathieu Boden, perform an autopsy on a corpse with a strange condition—the person died by rotting from the inside out. Surgeon General Story Patout, who is in charge of the vaccine project, begins an experiment on Arceneaux and hospital administrator Sister Lazare, both clones, to see if he can mutate them into a higher form. Arceneaux participates against his will, and as the experiment starts to affect him, pandemonium breaks loose. The Panacea vaccine turns out to contain a plague that kills millions around the globe. This was Patout’s plan all along. Arceneaux was “harvested” as a child, meaning his organs were taken to save his brother, Roby, leaving the pathologist scarred and seeing the world through prosthetic eyes. The experiment heals Arceneaux, giving him human eyes and long hair, which makes him look feminine. He uses this disguise to stay in the hospital, posing as the sister of a doctor named Elise Casaubon, and avoid Patout, who wants to harvest him again for antibodies. This sets up a battle pitting Arceneaux, Lazare, and Elise against Patout, Roby, and Elise’s sleazy husband, Richard, to end the surgeon general’s programs for the good of humankind. The novel has the bones of a captivating SF adventure, offering rich details and a remarkable protagonist. But the story feels convoluted, and there are a lot of helpful coincidences, such as Arceneaux’s looking feminine after the experiment takes hold. There is no thorough explanation for that, though it makes much of the following action possible. Unfortunately, the villains are cartoonish. Patout at one point explains that he was actually trying to help humanity by killing a large percentage of the population, reducing the strain on global resources. But there is no sense of what would drive him to such a monstrous deed. In addition, awkward prose hinders the narrative, as when Crouch writes of Arceneaux: “Anxiety broke over him like a red flag surf in the Gulf.” And instead of telling readers Roby has a trademark sneer, the author writes: “He sneered and it was a trademark.”
An intriguing medical tale hampered by uneven prose.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-63-927580-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
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