An auspicious beginning to an intelligent thriller series with a likable, oddball lead.
In Bickerstaff’s complex country-jumping biotech thriller, a potential revolutionary new process in the food industry could result in big bucks for some and murder for others.
Something doesn’t smell right at SeaPro Ltd, and it’s not just the black fiddle fish the Scottish company uses in its enzyme research. Biochemist and judo enthusiast Gavin Shawlens, who has “a passion for enzymes,” recently agreed to work with SeaPro, not because the company developed a new process using fish enzymes that might transform the food industry, but because the singular love of his life, Emma Patersun, owns the company. One drawback is she owns it with her husband, Jim. Another hitch is that powerful people, including billionaire James Barscadden, want control of SeaPro’s potentially lucrative discovery. Barscadden is a darling of the British government; his massive food-manufacturing company, BARSCO, employs more than 8,000 Brits. It also has at its core a secret organization known as Gyge’s Ring run by Barscadden, who “recruited a group of handpicked Ring leaders to do his bidding slavishly.” His mission is to take control at any cost of SeaPro’s new process. But he has competition. Other nations also want to snag the process, even if it’s fatally flawed. Like Barscadden, Shawlens is a member of a secret organization. He belongs to the Lambeth Group, a covert concern that works with MI5 to suss out possible technology disasters, and SeaPro’s new process just might be a doozy. Bickerstaff (Toxic Minds, 2016, etc.) writes with authority on biochemistry, and he has a flair for physical descriptions. One character “spread herself out over their bed like a sad old walrus” and another’s “white open-necked shirt would have benefitted from a quick once over with an iron.” The romance resumed by Emma and Gavin is sensual, with pet names for privates, and dialogue is believable. The story would have benefitted by being simpler, however. An abundance of characters, locales, and maneuvers make the book, written in British English, more work and less punchy.
An auspicious beginning to an intelligent thriller series with a likable, oddball lead.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4959-0365-6
Page Count: 316
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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