An intense thriller that’s promising, despite its flaws.
Software industry veteran Durbin’s debut novel captures what happens when technology outstrips the ability of humanity to harness it.
This complex thriller focuses on distributed processing on a large number of coordinated computers—the subject of one of the author’s real-life patents. Philippe Colbert, chief scientist at Distributed Nanotech, is murdered by grad student Alison Green, whose code he’d copied; later, a fellow student said that she hiked alone into the desert. Soon after Colbert’s death, Susanne Anderson, Nanotech’s CEO, hires freelance computer engineer James Forrest to investigate DNI’s Varabot system. While working together, the widowed Susanne and unlucky-in-love James fall for each other. Meanwhile, ineffectual detectives Alberta Lester and Frank Franken are adrift in the California tech industry, which is incomprehensible to them. Also lurking is Alison, who’s determined to erase her program. Susanne finds herself attempting to line up financing while peddling an unproven, and even suspect, system; meanwhile, James works to untangle Alison’s code to understand the artificial intelligence buried inside Varabot. He employs his own Visualizer program to do so, with terrifying results. Durbin takes the reader deep inside a tech startup in this novel, covering both its engineering and financial aspects. He does an admirable job of depicting the industry’s gamesmanship, and this gives the book a feeling of complex authenticity. However, this sometimes results in far too much detail, which bogs down the narrative as a whole. Durbin’s characters are a mixed bag; Susanne and James are well developed and believable, but others are stereotypes—an overreaching sales guy, a greedy venture capitalist—who exist solely as obstacles for Susanne to overcome. Alison, meanwhile, is a familiar mad-genius type who never feels threatening, despite the early murder, and the investigators’ sole role is to come to the rescue in the end.
An intense thriller that’s promising, despite its flaws.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-11806-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A bold but flawed debut novel.
There’s a mystery, a coming-of-age, abundant melodrama and even more abundant medical lore in this idiosyncratic first novel from a doctor best known for the memoir My Own Country (1994).
The nun is struggling to give birth in the hospital. The surgeon (is he also the father?) dithers. The late-arriving OB-GYN takes charge, losing the mother but saving her babies, identical twins. We are in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1954. The Indian nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, was a trained nurse who had met the British surgeon Thomas Stone on a sea voyage ministering to passengers dying of typhus. She then served as his assistant for seven years. The emotionally repressed Stone never declared his love for her; had they really done the deed? After the delivery, Stone rejects the babies and leaves Ethiopia. This is good news for Hema (Dr. Hemalatha, the Indian gynecologist), who becomes their surrogate mother and names them Shiva and Marion. When Shiva stops breathing, Dr. Ghosh (another Indian) diagnoses his apnea; again, a medical emergency throws two characters together. Ghosh and Hema marry and make a happy family of four. Marion eventually emerges as narrator. “Where but in medicine,” he asks, “might our conjoined, matricidal, patrifugal, twisted fate be explained?” The question is key, revealing Verghese’s intent: a family saga in the context of medicine. The ambition is laudable, but too often accounts of operations—a bowel obstruction here, a vasectomy there—overwhelm the narrative. Characterization suffers. The boys’ Ethiopian identity goes unexplored. Shiva is an enigma, though it’s no surprise he’ll have a medical career, like his brother, though far less orthodox. They become estranged over a girl, and eventually Marion leaves for America and an internship in the Bronx (the final, most suspenseful section). Once again a medical emergency defines the characters, though they are not large enough to fill the positively operatic roles Verghese has ordained for them.
A bold but flawed debut novel.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-41449-7
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
A super-exorcism that leaves the taste of somebody else's blood in your mouth and what a bad taste it is. King presents us with the riddle of a small Maine town that has been deserted overnight. Where did all the down-Easters go? Matter of fact, they're still there but they only get up at sundown. . . for a warm drink. . . .Ben Mears, a novelist, returns to Salem's Lot (pop. 1319), the hometown he hasn't seen since he was four years old, where he falls for a young painter who admires his books (what happens to her shouldn't happen to a Martian). Odd things are manifested. Someone rents the ghastly old Marsten mansion, closed since a horrible double murder-suicide in 1939; a dog is found impaled on a spiked fence; a healthy boy dies of anemia in one week and his brother vanishes. Ben displays tremendous calm considering that you're left to face a corpse that sits up after an autopsy and sinks its fangs into the coroner's neck. . . . Vampirism, necrophilia, et dreadful alia rather overplayed by the author of Carrie (1974).
Pub Date: Oct. 17, 1975
ISBN: 0385007515
Page Count: 458
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
