Improbable, sure, and complicated enough to try the reader’s patience at points. Still, as we’ve come to expect from...
Planet of the Apes meets Rocky—or maybe The Big Bang Theory.
Who knew that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government think tank, had its own elite military force, as if Big Bang's Dr. Sheldon Cooper were adept with an Uzi? That’s the conceit behind Rollins’ (The Sixth Extinction, 2014, etc.) pulse-quickening Sigma Force series, though his nerds, “former Special Forces soldiers who had been retrained in various scientific disciplines,” are tough guys one and all, even the women. And, oh, the women: James Bond himself would blush at the sight of an extra-perceptive assassin, her perspicacity “honed from her years as an assassin for hire,” shedding a towel for queen and country—or maybe for party and politburo. Rollins commences from the straight-from-the-headlines notion that Neanderthals mated with some other hominid type to produce extra-bright kids, the “hybrid vigor” that evolutionary biologists lecture about. Locate some bones, throw religion into the mix, and you have a doctrine-shaking new view of Adam and Eve. Throw in Athanasius Kircher, the great 17th-century Jesuit scholar so beloved of Umberto Eco, and you’ve got your Da Vinci Code–ish intellectual backdrop. Throw Chinese mad scientists, spies and counterspies, and monkeys and half-monkeys—half-monkeys?—into the narrative Cuisinart, and you’ve gone maybe a thread too far in a complex storyline. But let Rollins describe just one subthread: “The plan had been to kidnap her from Leipzig before she left Germany. With both sisters in hand, she could have leveraged the one against the other to gain their respective cooperation. Furthermore, that lapse in intelligence required accelerating their plans to raid the U.S. primate lab.” Got all that? If it’s conjuring visions of Jay and Silent Bob instead of Sly Stallone, then no worries: it gets more hairy-chested as it goes along, and not least because supersmart silverbacks and human hybrids come to figure in the yarn.
Improbable, sure, and complicated enough to try the reader’s patience at points. Still, as we’ve come to expect from Rollins, an altogether satisfying techno-thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238164-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally...
Yale’s secret societies hide a supernatural secret in this fantasy/murder mystery/school story.
Most Yale students get admitted through some combination of impressive academics, athletics, extracurriculars, family connections, and donations, or perhaps bribing the right coach. Not Galaxy “Alex” Stern. The protagonist of Bardugo’s (King of Scars, 2019, etc.) first novel for adults, a high school dropout and low-level drug dealer, Alex got in because she can see dead people. A Yale dean who's a member of Lethe, one of the college’s famously mysterious secret societies, offers Alex a free ride if she will use her spook-spotting abilities to help Lethe with its mission: overseeing the other secret societies’ occult rituals. In Bardugo’s universe, the “Ancient Eight” secret societies (Lethe is the eponymous Ninth House) are not just old boys’ breeding grounds for the CIA, CEOs, Supreme Court justices, and so on, as they are in ours; they’re wielders of actual magic. Skull and Bones performs prognostications by borrowing patients from the local hospital, cutting them open, and examining their entrails. St. Elmo’s specializes in weather magic, useful for commodities traders; Aurelian, in unbreakable contracts; Manuscript goes in for glamours, or “illusions and lies,” helpful to politicians and movie stars alike. And all these rituals attract ghosts. It’s Alex’s job to keep the supernatural forces from embarrassing the magical elite by releasing chaos into the community (all while trying desperately to keep her grades up). “Dealing with ghosts was like riding the subway: Do not make eye contact. Do not smile. Do not engage. Otherwise, you never know what might follow you home.” A townie’s murder sets in motion a taut plot full of drug deals, drunken assaults, corruption, and cover-ups. Loyalties stretch and snap. Under it all runs the deep, dark river of ambition and anxiety that at once powers and undermines the Yale experience. Alex may have more reason than most to feel like an imposter, but anyone who’s spent time around the golden children of the Ivy League will likely recognize her self-doubt.
With an aura of both enchantment and authenticity, Bardugo’s compulsively readable novel leaves a portal ajar for equally dazzling sequels.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-31307-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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