An entertaining debut that’s just what the doctor ordered.
Sinister forces stop at nothing to squelch a medical breakthrough in this adrenalized thriller.
You’d think everyone would rejoice over a cure for cancer, but if it’s a cheap and un-patentable cure, shadowy interests that profit from cancer treatments may find it more of a threat than a boon. That’s what Annika Guthrie and Elliott Lindell, researchers for competing pharmaceutical companies working on concurrent trials for rival chemotherapy drugs, didn’t count on. As alternative medicine enthusiasts, the pair have teamed up to secretly give their patients a cocktail of natural supplements and plant extracts formulated by Elliott’s brilliant computer model of cancer cells. Annika’s joy over the resulting miraculous remissions turns to dismay when said patients start dying off in suspicious accidents. But that’s par for the course in a medical-industrial complex where every slovenly lab tech is a spy and paramilitary squads are a cost of doing business. Soon everyone is after Elliott’s model, including Russian assassin Sydney (née Stalina) and a sinister outfit known as The Trust that is led by a never-seen man named Smoke whose cigarette-hoarsened voice on speaker-phone tirades suggests a looming need for the cure. Assisted by Annika and her long-suffering husband Peter, Elliott pinballs around the world on a complex and not quite coherent plan to save his life’s work (and his life). The author includes a bibliography on natural cancer treatments, but Elliott’s all-important cancer model is mainly a MacGuffin that propels a frenetic plot that makes no more sense than is strictly necessary. (One character hits on a strategy so sane and obvious—publicize the formula and sell it out of a Tijuana clinic—that you just know it will end badly.) Fortunately, Evers is a skillful writer who expertly choreographs a sprawling cast of colorful characters. He balances nifty oncology procedural with suspenseful intrigue and taut action scenes that teeter between agonizing stand-offs and jolting shocks. The result is an engrossing, well-paced thriller that will keep your heart rate up.
An entertaining debut that’s just what the doctor ordered.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1439276556
Page Count: 322
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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