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
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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