A fast-paced read that prioritizes meticulous scientific research over reader engagement.
A former theoretical physics prodigy battles an MIT rival and the dark web in this thriller.
Andrew Lawrence has been through the mill. He was once a child prodigy at MIT, but when his gifted sister committed suicide and his family imploded, young Andrew suffered a breakdown. Years later, he returns to MIT in a postdoctoral position, wanting nothing more than to devote himself to his “love of discovery, of pure science, of research for its own sake.” Unfortunately his old rival, professor Stanley Prost, is in charge of the Center for Theoretical Physics and will go out of his way to make sure Andrew is made to feel undermined and unwelcome. When a trip to CERN ends with an unknown hacker stealing data from the server—information that Andrew needs to prove his latest work in “Extended Supergravity Grand Unification Theory”—he becomes the FBI’s prime suspect. Together with his Ph.D. candidate girlfriend, Emma Franklin, and fellow supersymmetry enthusiast Eugene Weyl, Andrew will have to journey deep into the dark web in order to prove his innocence once and for all. At one point, Andrew tells his cohorts: “We need to find out what we’re dealing with and how to defend ourselves. The problem is that the hackers are unknown and far away. We have to learn more about them and lure them into an exposed position.” Newcomers to the dense world of theoretical physics will undoubtedly struggle with a novel that does little to make its painstaking research palatable to the layperson. Where dialogue isn’t excessively formal or pure exposition, it is largely an exchange of impenetrable jargon. Despite a valiant attempt to make the machinations of competing researchers feel intriguing, the stakes of the thriller remain nebulous. Thankfully, the pace is brisk enough to keep the plot moving, especially when Alesso’s (Captain Hawkins, 2016, etc.) ambitious series opener takes a hard left down the dark alley of international cybercrime. But the characterization is thin; the action elements are underwritten; and the final plot twist feels less like a surprise than a simple confirmation of readers’ earliest suspicions. These issues, coupled with the relatively short length, give the impression of a well-structured but early draft of a much more compelling novel.
A fast-paced read that prioritizes meticulous scientific research over reader engagement.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-976456-65-7
Page Count: 268
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2018
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
