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
BOOK REVIEW
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.
What hasn’t legendary legal eagle Grisham tried yet? How about a thriller about serial kidnapping and international terrorism.
When Paul and Chelsea Tanner disappear during a day trip on their Paris honeymoon, their abductors demand a ransom of $2 million from Chelsea’s wealthy parents, and a few days later the same sum from Paul’s much less well-heeled parents. After orthopedist Lowell Clayburn, Chelsea’s father, ponies up the ransom without breathing a word to the authorities, his daughter is promptly released. But even though Paul’s parents sell their home, liquidate their assets, and borrow money from the Clayburns to meet the kidnappers’ demands, the villains hold on to Paul anyway. Asked whether he’s ever seen such an outcome in a double kidnapping, FBI deputy director Andrew Strong tells Lowell: “No, this is a new one.” But it’s not, as Strong knows all too well; it’s the third such active case, all involving honeymooning couples whose bridegrooms had served in the armed forces. After masterfully drawing readers in with his bare-knuckle account of the Tanners’ abduction and the attempt by their families and the CIA to tell the lies required to keep caring friends and the rapacious press at bay, Grisham effortlessly switches gears to follow CIA agent Rae Claire Russo and Stuart Nash, a former Department of Justice prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who agrees to marry her so they can serve as bait for the kidnappers, whose motives include justice and revenge as well as cold hard cash. So much for the imprisoned Paul’s wistful reflection that “hopefully, it was only about money.”
The story unfolds so irresistibly that newcomers may think Grisham’s been writing thrillers like this his whole life.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9780385550543
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
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
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