A bit slow to get going, but the heady concept, action, and danger pay dividends.
Debut author Finch’s international thriller features a young psychologist researching ancestral memory as a serial killer collects heads.
After Christian Yates completes his doctorate degree in psychology, he begins his career as an assistant professor. This career in academia is very short lived; Christian’s first lecture to undergraduates finds him quickly out of a job, as he has some views that are outside the mainstream. Specifically, he believes that humans have memories of their ancestors contained in their DNA. Although these memories are not readily available, they could be accessed, he posits, through some types of head trauma or the use of psychoactive substances, such as psychedelic mushrooms (hence the use of the latter in some Indigenous cultures). The undergraduates may lap this stuff up, but the senior faculty are simply not having it. All seems lost for Christian until he receives a mysterious job offer to work in Denmark: A company called Norkap Pharmaceuticals wants Christian’s help with their psychotropic drug research and is willing to offer him quite an impressive employment package. As the CEO, Hans Rasmussen, explains to Christian, his theories are “truer than you know.” Christian arrives in Denmark, where he comes under the wing of Hans’ nephew, Henrik. Henrik parties hard, and Christian does his best to keep up. He is also warned that Norkap may be engaged in unethical behavior. Meanwhile, a serial killer with a penchant for decapitation called “the Surgeon” is on the loose. It is believed that the Surgeon has killed eight people so far. The Surgeon is someone that Christian once met in the course of working with a patient who had “an unending flow of ancestral memories and languages that no human could have learned or faked.”
The premise of the story is a unique blend of speculative science and murder mystery—concepts like ancient memories do not typically come up in serial killer narratives. Still, while Christian’s students (the ones he has for one day, anyway) are certainly excited about his ideas, his expository lecturing can be dense. Though his speech gets one character worked up over the ethics of experimenting on worms, it throws an awful lot of information at the reader early on. This info dump, combined with a tragic event in Christian’s past and his difficulties with the patient who exhibited ancestral memories, make for slow-going early chapters. However, when the story moves to Denmark, the plot starts to jell, raising compelling questions (should Norkap be trusted?). When the action transfers to Greenland, Christian is informed almost immediately that he is in great danger—this is a thriller, after all, and peril becomes ever-present. Christian is later told, “We’re part of something far larger than ourselves, a saga that has unfolded over decades, leaving countless lives in ruins.” Serious stuff indeed—the reader can’t resist going forward to find out how it all connects.
A bit slow to get going, but the heady concept, action, and danger pay dividends.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9798856118710
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.
Three siblings on very different paths learn that their family home may be haunted by secrets.
Eldest daughter Beth is alone with her fading mother as she takes her final breath and says something about Beth’s long-departed brother and sister, who may not have disappeared forever. Beth is still reeling from the loss of her mother when her estranged siblings show up. Michael, the youngest, hasn’t been home since their father’s disappearance seven years ago. In the meantime, he’s outgrown his siblings, trading his share of the family troubles for a high-paying job in San Jose. Nicole, the middle child, has been overpowered by addiction and prioritized tuning out reality over any sense of responsibility, much to Beth’s disgust. Though their mother’s death marks an ending for the family, it’s also a beginning, as the three siblings realize when they find a disturbing videotape among their parents’ belongings. The video, from 1999, sheds suspicion on their father’s disappearance, linking it to a long-unsolved neighborhood mystery. Was it just a series of unfortunate circumstances that broke the family apart, or does something more sinister underlie the sadness they’ve all found in life? In chapters that rotate among the family’s first-person narratives, the siblings take turns digging up stories and secrets in their search for solace.
Answers are hard to come by in this twisting tale designed to trick and delight.Pub Date: April 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798212182843
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
© 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
