by James Rollins ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2008
Not scary enough to distract from the wacky science.
Cute little stolen gypsy kids hold the balance of power as a Russian supermom plans to poison several ecosystems.
Opening with the sack of Delphi by Romans unhappy with the latest oracular projections, Rollins (The Judas Strain, 2007, etc.) pauses briefly in the mid-century communist Romanian Carpathians where Russians, led by a very tough dame, stage a brutal attack on an isolated gypsy village. He next plunges us into present-day Washington, D.C., where a derelict scientist takes a sniper’s bullet in his back and falls into the arms of Sigma Force strongman Gray Pierce just outside the Smithsonian castle. Gray, who had taken the old guy to be a homeless vet, is surprised to be slipped an ancient Greek coin by the dying man who, upon examination in Sigma’s handy lab deep under the Smithsonian castle, is revealed to have been a professor. The corpse is highly radioactive. Gray and his team, mourning the recent death of their resourceful one-armed colleague Monk Bryant, are plunged into solving the murder, which was the work of one of the Russians from that Carpathian massacre, now a grandfatherly scientist who has in tow Sasha, a little gypsy girl sporting a surgical steel implant that sets off seeming psychic superpowers. She’s one of a crop of children bred from a strain of savants swept up in that Romanian raid. The experiments with the kids continued after the Soviet collapse thanks to an influx of capitalist cash, so once agent Gray starts following clues, he finds that he and his team are in danger not only from evil Russians but from evil Americans. Meanwhile, in radioactive Ukraine, Monk Bryant, not at all dead, wakes from an amnesiac coma to answer a plea for help from a swarm of kids and a kindly chimp with cranial implants just like the one he now sports. It all has to do with a plot to restore Russia to its rightful place.
Not scary enough to distract from the wacky science.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-123094-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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
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by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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