A paranoid sci-fi fantasy that takes a spiritual turn; poolside reading for ashram fans.
In a dystopic America, a data analyst finds himself hunted by his own company following his viewing of mysterious, otherworldly images on a camera card.
In this final installment of Scott’s (Tracking Terra, 2011, etc.) trilogy, a future surveillance-state America boasts implanted GPS trackers and nonstop monitoring of citizens by sinister corporations. And every corporation here seems to be evil (except maybe Home Depot). Daren Alec Kyle, aka Dak, displays advanced visual pattern recognition and 3-D acuity after a youthful head injury. He’s an intel asset for rogue corporation Cascade, which asks him to assess an old camera card ominously found amid human bones in the Arizona desert. The murky and incomplete pixels show odd circular shapes and could be anything. Dak subsequently suffers a night visit from his own doppelgänger apparition warning that the pictures are about “survival.” That’s enough for Cascade to turn on Dak, making him a fugitive. Fortunately, since “paranoia had become my middle name,” the resourceful (but nonviolent) Dak subscribes to an elite security firm that helps him during his cross-country odyssey to Florida as he deals with pursuit and betrayal by faceless foes and seeming friends. Dak intuits a connection between his plight and the hot topic of “Planet X,” aka Nibiru, a mythic 10th planet with a 22,000-year orbit, its intrusions bringing extinction-level catastrophe. He meets Kisha Anderson, whose own malevolent corporation makes her hype the Planet X theory while scheming to discredit her. Scott’s tale is Kafkaesque indeed; only in the latter half does the Shirley MacLaine–esque heroine of Tracking Terra enter from stage left. She’s Sara Alessa Giustino, a beautiful, ageless “Ascended Master” type, groomed more than 500 years ago by aliens to safeguard Earth’s evolution. This third installment of the author’s New Age–y trilogy unites elements from previous volumes while reading—mostly—like a stand-alone. Readers who expect this closer to be an apocalyptic showdown between good and evil instead get a muted finale, with Dak’s Pilgrim’s Progress–esque ascension to cosmic discipleship rather than the destruction of a Death Star manqué. With super-Sara in the mix, the story is almost akin to a Wonder Woman adventure that focuses more on mortal boyfriend Steve Trevor than Amazonian heroine Diana Prince.
A paranoid sci-fi fantasy that takes a spiritual turn; poolside reading for ashram fans.Pub Date: April 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3295-0
Page Count: 344
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 25, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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