An edifying tale of the Beltway that fails to entertain.
A political drama about a gruesome legislative fight over approval of a popular new drug.
Colleen Keegan has been named the new CEO of major pharmaceutical company Miradol, the third-largest pharmaceutical company in the world. She faces a steep uphill climb after a couple of failed drug trials that drained the corporation’s coffers and wounded its reputation. However, she believes that a new drug in the works, which promises to significantly extend the average human life span, will catapult Miradol back to prosperity. The new product, Juventel, will require years of costly trials before it can be brought to market, so Keegan chooses to make an end run around the slow Food and Drug Administration approval process and classify it “off-label” as an ameliorative for a skin condition. And although such drugs can’t normally be advertised on television legally, her lawyer, Jake Siskoff, pushes legislation that would permit it. “The Life Bill,” as it comes to be known, becomes exceedingly popular as demand for Juventel skyrockets, and a political war over its merits is angrily waged in public. Republican U.S. Rep. Joe Hazeldine of Indiana, the new speaker of the House, attempts to get the bill through, adding a stipulation that allows Medicare to negotiate lower prices with pharmaceutical companies—a blow to the industry. But Republican U.S. Rep. Sam Kelley of Tennessee, a congressional veteran, stubbornly opposes the bill as a myopic dismissal of safety protocols. Author Malchow’s (The Dragon and the Firefly, 2014, etc.) quarter-century of experience as a political consultant is impossible to miss, as he’s clearly an expert on the dark machinations of American political life; his story is a kind of brutally realistic civics lesson. However, the plot inches forward at a tediously languid pace, and new characters are introduced too quickly for readers to develop any sustained interest in them. Also, some of the plot is dramatically improbable or even inexplicable; for instance, it simply doesn’t make sense that Keegan would risk outsourcing a social media campaign for Juventel to the Russian government. Are there really no reliable—and safer—options available in the United States?
An edifying tale of the Beltway that fails to entertain.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 251
Publisher: Double M
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 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.
