“Soulmates” means something different in this entertaining psychological thriller.
A therapist and the patient she’s treating stumble into a shocking and life-threatening surprise.
When Santa Monica therapist Sarah Newcomb hypnotizes her patients, most of them remember past lives, decades or centuries ago. Not Marigold Chu. The young software engineer is a receptive patient, but under hypnosis, she describes another life that seems to be in the future—or even the present. That leads to two problems. One is information from Marigold’s other self about a coming industrial explosion, which Sarah feels compelled to report (anonymously) to the authorities. The other is the realization that, instead of being a garden-variety case of reincarnation, Marigold is somehow sharing a soul with a very much alive middle-aged Denver police detective named Brian Huntley. Those two issues soon bring an FBI agent to Sarah’s door: Grant Lukather from the agency’s Predictive Analytics unit. As the trio tries to figure out what’s going on, it quickly becomes clear that Brian is in jeopardy from a serial murderer nicknamed the Ash Killer, because of a substance he smears on his victims’ foreheads—an ash whose source police forensics can’t identify. Even stranger, the man identified as the Ash Killer is already in prison. Sarah, Marigold, and Grant dash off from California to Colorado to save Brian, sparks flying—Sarah is sort-of engaged to a good-enough boyfriend, Grant reeling from a tragic romantic loss, but it doesn’t take a clairvoyant to see they’re falling for each other. The book, the first novel by an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, does little to explain the phenomenon of Marigold and Brian’s tie other than some sketchy ideas about the exploding human population outrunning the supply of souls, but it’s used to good effect in relation to the Ash Killer. Sarah and Grant toss pretty much every protocol about how therapists and law enforcement officers are supposed to behave right out the window; if you’re willing to suspend disbelief about that and communal souls, this is a suspenseful and fast-paced tale.
“Soulmates” means something different in this entertaining psychological thriller.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250384294
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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
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
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