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
Categories: THRILLER
Did you like this book?
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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Did you like this book?
A serial killer with a sense of history is the baddie in this latest from Baldacci, one of the reigning kings of potboilers (Split Second, 2003, etc.).
He kills, he leaves clues, he flatters through imitation: Son of Sam, the San Francisco Zodiac killer, Richard Ramirez, John Wayne Gracy, and so on down a sanguinary list of accredited members of the Monsters’ Hall of Fame. Suddenly, the landscape of poor little Wrightsburg, Virginia, is littered with corpses, and ex-Secret Service agents Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have their hands full. That’s because bewildered, beleaguered Chief of Police Todd Williams has turned to the newly minted private investigating firm of King and Maxwell for desperately needed (unofficial) help. Even these ratiocinative wizards, however, admit to puzzlement. “But I'm not getting this,” says Michelle. “Why commit murders in similar styles to past killers as a copycat would and then write letters making it clear you’re not them?” Excellent question, and it goes pretty much unanswered. Never mind—enter the battling Battles, a family with the requisite number of sins and secrets to qualify fully as hot southern Gothic and to prop up a plot in need. Bobby Battles, the patriarch, is bedridden, but Remmy, his wife, is one lively mischief-making steel magnolia. She’s brought breaking-and-entering charges against decent local handyman Junior Deaver, who as a result languishes in the county jail. Convinced of his innocence, Junior’s lawyer hires King & Maxwell to sniff around for exculpatory evidence. Well, will the two plot streams flow together? You betcha. Will the copycat-serial-killer at one point decide that King and Maxwell are just too clever to live? Inevitably. And when at last that CCSK’s identity is revealed and his crimes explained (talkily and tediously), will readers be satisfied? Only the charitable among them.
Lame but, like its predecessors, bound for bestsellerdom.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2004
ISBN: 0-446-53108-1
Page Count: 440
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
Categories: THRILLER
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
