An absorbing story of addiction, deceit, and perpetual menace.
A U.S. government agent in the near future stumbles onto a conspiracy to brainwash citizens in Goodman’s debut thriller.
It’s 2023, and the latest assignment for agent Hunter Leary of the Domestic Central Intelligence Agency is looking into a documentary film, currently in production, about Project Oedipus, an alleged “deep-state conspiracy to addict [American] leaders and create sex scandals,” as a Variety article put it. However, the main purpose for DCIA’s formation was to investigate the Hidden Ones, who are rumored to be responsible for many nefarious activities. The group, which has existed for a century, is known by other names, such as “the Freemasons” or “the Illuminati,” and their existence was only confirmed two years ago. Currently, Hunter and his new partner, Sammi Pringle, are keeping an eye on a different secret society, known as the Nameless, which apparently has a plan to control “key players” in society with “some sort of sexual brainwashing.” Hunter is a capable DCIA agent, but he’s also a habitual user of the drug Splurge, which he believes enhances his senses. But its potential benefits may not be enough to help him take on the members of the shady organizations that surround him. Hunter’s first-person narration is framed as a historical account, but the overall story plays out like a well-paced thriller. Shifts to a third-person perspective reveal characters’ furtive agendas and shocking deaths. Moreover, there’s an overarching mystery of how Splurge, as well as Banshees—“neotech-networks” that offer “instantaneous, emotional connections with every other user currently online”—will spawn an imminent “Great Addiction.” Despite this story’s reliance on abstract ideas, Goodman provides readers with plenty of concrete details, as in descriptions of Hunter’s Splurge highs (“Thoughts arrange themselves into a regular order, like an architectural structure”). The tale also features explicit sexual encounters and copious amounts of bodily fluids. The conclusion is satisfying, but there’s definite room for a sequel, particularly as readers learn relatively little about the titular Banshees.
An absorbing story of addiction, deceit, and perpetual menace.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 247
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: yesterday
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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