A solid Sigma Force adventure that’s sure to please thriller fans.
Life on Earth may come to an end in this fast-moving Sigma Force novel.
In 1815, Mount Tambora exploded in the South Pacific, causing massive death and destruction. Its worldwide cloud cover caused the “year without a summer” in 1816. Two centuries later, Sigma Force explores the deepest parts of the Pacific with ultrasophisticated equipment such as the five-tiered Titan station. In the depths of the Coral Sea, they encounter giant coral forests containing highly aggressive and hostile giant coral trees. Deep in the crushing depths of the Tonga Trench lies a sunken nuclear submarine the Chinese don't want anyone to know about. Meanwhile, Asia is beset by earthquakes and tsunamis, perhaps caused by disturbances in the “massive slabs” of the planetoid Theia, speculated to have crashed into Earth billions of years ago. Said slabs are buried in Earth’s upper mantle, and “they may soon destroy us.” Of course, a thriller needs human villains too; enter a rogue Chinese team that thinks they may be able to use ELF—extremely low-frequency—transmissions to manipulate pieces of Theia and cause earthquakes and tsunamis at will. Thus, China would have a weapon to make nuclear arsenals obsolete and ensure its world dominance for centuries to come. (That sounds like an iffy proposition, but who knows?) Along with a number of helpful illustrations, the author mixes his considerable scientific knowledge with ancient myths, speculation, and imagination. A Chinese sailor’s body undergoes “biomineralization,” turning him to stone. The sound of bullroarers may appease the angry gods as some pin their hopes on lost Aboriginal mythology to quell the quakes. Scientists speculate on DNA based on silicon rather than carbon. And if you’ve ever wondered what would happen if your submersible springs a leak 11,000 meters below the ocean’s surface, well—no spoilers here—it’s not good. There’s plenty of brisk action in this undersea yarn, of both the people vs. people and coral vs. people variety. And don’t worry about the world really ending, because Rollins plans a sequel.
A solid Sigma Force adventure that’s sure to please thriller fans.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2023
ISBN: 9780062893079
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
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
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