An intricate, action-packed interplanetary ride that will excite SF fans.
An SF thriller focuses on a Venusian actor who finds himself in deep trouble.
Something is rotten in colonial Venus. People are separated into castelike groups—hedonites and reformers—and Hix falls in the first category. Once a child of the Venusian slums, Hix grew up to become a famous actor with the nickname Falcon Fire. But his status is less celebrated when readers first encounter him, as he is being held prisoner on an “interplanetary transport ferry” called the Zephyr Spear, heading to Earth’s orbit for a “surface core extraction” mission. Hix is accused of multiple crimes—such as commandeering an airship—but the manslaughter charge for the death of his love, Shawna, is iffy. While Neeva, Shawna’s sister, has been primed to become “Keeper of the First Colony heritage,” she is first tasked with overseeing the case regarding Hix. Hix quickly builds a crew of prisoners aboard the Zephyr Spear,and they form a plan to travel to Venus only to end up heading directly toward Earth. Neeva, meanwhile, in the midst of her investigation, contends with hedonite bombs, a potential reformer conspiracy, and her desire to track down Mel, Hix’s beloved sister. Otto’s story is part action thriller and part outer-space police procedural, but it’s peppered with heart throughout. This is shown in the evident love between Hix and his sister—most notably, in one poignant moment between the two—and in Neeva’s affection for Shawna and her profound loss. The prose is descriptive, which aids in the author’s extensive worldbuilding. Life on Venus for these characters is fully developed through Otto’s prose, to the point where certain terminology may initially be a bit confusing to readers: “A symbiont by the name of NM-198 has gone missing in the south pole psychanthropic network.” Similarly, the story sometimes offers a multitude of characters to keep track of, which becomes a tad daunting. Still, the author’s tale is thorough and engaging. Hix manages to be a hero worth rooting for without being too cheesy or reduced to an action trope. And Neeva, particularly when Otto details her backstory with her parents, is a strong and determined character while still remaining vulnerable and flawed.
An intricate, action-packed interplanetary ride that will excite SF fans.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 468
Publisher: Sagis Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.
Revenge is the order of the day in this action-packed Gray Man thriller.
That freelance assassin Court Gentry has enemies shocks no one. Code-named Violator in his CIA days, he has since become the Gray Man, so elusive that some think him a myth. He’s not complicated: “If I’ve got pants on, I’ve got a gun on,” he describes himself succinctly. In this episode, everybody wants something. James Westwood wants to be senator and eventually president, and isn’t above committing treason to get there. Two fearsome killers, each with his own agenda, want Gentry dead. Gentry himself wants to get to Russia for contract work, but first he must get out of Bulgaria, where he kills Northern Irish criminal Charlie Coyle in a gunfight. Hyperline Level IIIA body armor saves Gentry’s life in that encounter, but now he must face Charlie’s dad, Campbell Coyle, whose “one singular objective in life” is to come to America and cut a bloody swath to exact deadly revenge on “the man who had murdered his son.” The elder Coyle is a “bad man with a dark history, and he came from a long line of men with dark histories.” Yet he understands how much he and the Gray Man have in common, that they are both “God’s living proof” that humans have not progressed in 800 years. There’s also Lancer, a dangerous former Navy SEAL turned assassin who says that “Court Gentry is the man who put me in prison in Cuba, and he’s gonna pay.” Meanwhile, series regular Zack Hightower spies on his biological daughter. He means no harm but simply wants to know that she’s well, but what follows is one damn thing after another. At first it looks like a separate plot line, but everything comes back to the Gray Man. The story is nearly 500 pages of gunfire, explosions, a spring-loaded wrist stiletto, treason, vengeance, blood, bodies, and a teenage girl who loves her adoptive father and doesn’t know bio dad even exists.
Fun for fans of fictional mayhem.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2026
ISBN: 9780593954812
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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