Having begun so impressively with The Silent Corner (2016), Koontz's four-title series still has its share of excitement but...
With evil forces closing in on her hidden-away little boy as a way of getting to her, disgraced former FBI agent Jane Hawk (The Crooked Staircase, 2018, etc.) intensifies her one-woman campaign against a full-blown mind-control conspiracy.
Still traumatized by the death of her husband, a war veteran who was programmed to kill himself, Jane has stashed her 5-year-old, Travis, with friends in Southern California's Orange County. With her super fighting and undercover skills, she has out-thought and out-fought the malevolent Techno Arcadians, whose plans for remaking the world include enslaving innocents by injecting them with nanoconstructs. Wrongfully indicted for espionage, treason, and murder and demonized by the media, Jane, America's most wanted fugitive, is forced to alter her stealth strategies to save her son. Her ardent foes include Egon Gottfrey, an imbalanced agent with a Homeland Security background who follows the orders of the Unknown Playwright, and Ivan Petro, "a hit team all by himself." But though this is "a Jane Hawk novel," our heroine spends much of the book offstage. And when she is in action, the once dominating Jane can seem as programmed as any of the living victims. ("It's all like one big video game," says Gottfrey, perhaps speaking to us as the book's Unknown Critic.) The best scenes are reserved for a plucky 12-year-old girl named Laurie, who is in the clutches of a sadistic, brain-altered female FBI agent, and sweet young Travis, whose emergency Plan B has him and his dogs staying with a kindly, autistic recluse who made millions developing apps.
Having begun so impressively with The Silent Corner (2016), Koontz's four-title series still has its share of excitement but seems to have run out of ideas for its cagey heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-48370-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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