A thriller with capable heroes that portrays a future that feels scarily near.
In this SF thriller, brain chips are supposed to keep people healthy and connected to society—but they may be killing some of them.
In a post-privacy United States, virtually everyone has a Vitasync neurochip installed at the base of their brain. These technological marvels connect people to apps such as MyPharm, which treats small health problems, and a vast digital overlay of visual information. The chips record one’s experiences into a “lifelog,” which is illegal to tamper with and makes one a citizen who can hold a job and open a bank account. One day, Cole Westbay wakes to find his apartment trashed and his chip stolen. Without his connection, he feels like a “junkie coming down from a bad trip.” Cole works for BioNarratus, the company that’s cornered the neurochip market. He’s also the protégé of Lounis Belrose, one of the world’s most powerful people. Cole had been researching why several senators, judges, and other key figures have been meeting early ends and how this may be connected to Vitasync’s latest software patch. After Cole asks a neighbor to call the police for him, he’s arrested for the crime of “effacement,” or having an offline lifelog. When Lounis bails him out of jail—instead of Cole’s girlfriend, Tesla Carrick, who also works for BioNarratus—Cole starts to suspect that something shady is going on. At a pawn shop, he hunts for Augmented Reality glasses to reconnect to the world, and he later meets Eva Spangler, an attorney who reveals to him an aspect of society that he’d never dreamed possible.
Hawkes superbly extrapolates what our technology-dependent and pandemic-stricken world might be like a dozen years from now. Despite the illegality of effacement, a large segment of the population is shown to live off the grid, divested from modernity by economics or circumstance; Cole is so ensconced in a busy realm of digital engagement that he has no idea these people even exist. Yet the author also shows that the protagonist does have a heart, although he’s given it to Tesla, a narcissist who’s wary of commitment. Eva, who drives sports cars, is skilled with a gun, and has a killer smile, becomes Cole’s—and the reader’s—guide through Control, Alt, Delete, a secret group that cherishes privacy. Hawkes occasionally embraces a hard-boiled tone in his prose, as in the line, “Being in the cell was a bit like being in a casino, with no clocks and no change in the lighting. But he had more to lose than a bet, and no one was bringing him cocktails.” The author mentions a “Great Pandemic” in connection with cruise-ship horrors, but Hawke’s descriptions of people’s dwindling social skills are more intriguing; many use “quints,” for example—digital projections that have replaced physical handshakes as greetings. Although the assassin hunting Cole, Phillip Chestnut, seems robotic, other characters show notable agency. A somewhat-winding journey on snowmobiles and through a courtroom brings readers to an enjoyably unexpected finale.
A thriller with capable heroes that portrays a future that feels scarily near.Pub Date: March 27, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-72-861870-6
Page Count: 404
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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