by F. Paul Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 5, 2016
An intelligent, intriguing, fast-moving blend of science fiction and thriller.
When Suffolk County medical examiner Laura Fanning completes post-mortems on two men in perfect condition, she soon learns that their perfect health traces back to a secret originating in the year 536 at an apostate Benedictine monastery isolated in the Pyrenees Mountains.
Evidence appears suggesting the men have taken a panacea, an ancient remedy for any illness or injury. Despite her scientific skepticism, Fanning is hired by mega-billionaire Clayton Stahlman, who's dying from lung disease, to seek ikhar, the panacea. Stahlman assigns Rick Hayden, supposedly an ex-SEAL, as her bodyguard, and the unlikely pair races from New York to Quintana Roo, then the Negev, the Pyrenees, and finally the Orkneys. Hayden’s intriguing back story includes a secret link to CIA agent Nelson Fife, a member of the clandestine 536 Brotherhood, an esoteric monastic order. The Brotherhood believes mankind’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden means human beings deserve a lifetime of "pain and grief and suffering and death," and thus ikhar comes from the Serpent, the devil, and so Fife’s willing to use the agency’s assets to thwart Fanning’s quest. Wilson’s (Fear City, 2014, etc.) narrative flies at jet speed, even when Hayden philosophically muses over "a vast, cool, and unsympathetic" intelligence manipulating humankind. The dialogue is seamless, natural, and eventually ratchets up the tension when Fanning develops a personal reason for finding the potion. Wilson’s complex, entertaining, smart story also includes comet-induced climate change, Gaulish Druids, German nihilists, Christianity’s Aryan offshoot, and commentary on how a panacea would influence social order. Fanning and Hayden escape Hellfire missiles, dispose of villains in a manner most gruesome, and return home to find the billionaire ready to hire them for a sequel.
An intelligent, intriguing, fast-moving blend of science fiction and thriller.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8516-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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