A scientifically grounded SF thriller about a global pandemic.
A troubled married couple works to save the world from a plague in Vettori’s science fiction novel.
The year is 2113. World War III nearly wiped out civilization, but humans have managed to claw their way back to a high standard of living, and countries have reconstituted along the same familiar power axes, including the United States, the European Union, and China. Dr. Syia Case serves as the Director of Epidemiology at the National Institutes of Health. She’s recently separated from her husband Paul, the current White House Chief of Staff, due to the fallout from their inability to conceive a child. One day, Syia gets an alarming message from a colleague in China that suggests the Chinese are performing studies on a virus that’s been making bats hyper-aggressive. Soon after, that colleague is killed when the disease jumps to humans. Worried about a potential global spread, Syia passes the information on to Paul, who warns the president, entrepreneur-turned-politician Daniel Piper. (Daniel happens to be Paul’s best friend and former partner in their interstellar mining business as well as Syia’s high school sweetheart.) Daniel is reluctant to take the threat seriously, leaving Syia and Paul to do whatever they can to prepare for the inevitable pandemic. When the virus reaches American shores, the couple finds that they aren’t just dealing with a deadly pathogen, but also an increasingly tyrannical president. Vettori’s technical knowledge has allowed her to craft a virus of terrifying verisimilitude, and the symptoms are quite a bit grizzlier than those of Covid-19. The author is less adept when it comes to her characters, particularly their dialogue: “I tried to talk to you about geopolitical issues when I first started the job, but you weren’t interested,” Paul shouts at Syia, who responds, slightly ham-fistedly, “And you wouldn’t discuss the pain of not having a child!” A number of characters and their actions will remind readers of our own time, but the future setting provides a welcome level of distance and fantasy.
A scientifically grounded SF thriller about a global pandemic.Pub Date: March 28, 2024
ISBN: 9798889100928
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers LLC
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2024
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
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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