Social issues, cool not-so-far-in-the-future gadgets, and a well-paced plot add up to a good read.
This sequel to The Genesis Code (2014) explores the high-stakes world of biotech.
Metzl's latest features the same cast and same scientific underbelly that appeared in The Genesis Code; it's set two years later, in 2025. Newspaper reporter Rich Azadian is enjoying the fruits of his success with a book that happens to be called Genesis Code when he's assigned an odd missing-person story by his editor at the Kansas City Star. As he follows the clues he realizes that a pattern is forming—two octogenarian scientists, both Jewish, both dying of cancer, have disappeared from hospice care and appeared on security video at the Tobago airport. But there's something strange about the videos: even though eye-scanning technology at the airport verifies the identities of the missing scientists, they look like men in their 40s clearing customs. Rich's investigation finds that a researcher named Noam Heller is the key; he's working on a project to reverse illness and aging, a fountain of youth to honor his late wife, who died of cancer. When Rich and his girlfriend, Toni, visit Heller’s lab—Rich brings Toni and her dog with him to charm the suspicious doctor into talking to him—they hear the “eternal sonata” that plays as Heller works, a composite of all Bach's sonatas that's programmed to keep playing forever. Big pharma and greed are the ghosts in the music; soon Heller's found dead, and for some reason Toni becomes a target for the bad guys. The story goes global as Rich visits Cuba and then a floating research facility near Santo Domingo, looking for answers about the missing scientists. Metzl has created a wonderful symbol in Scientists Beyond Nations, a research group based on an almost invisible ship, which protects medical ethics by excluding national interests from their research so their discoveries can benefit everyone.
Social issues, cool not-so-far-in-the-future gadgets, and a well-paced plot add up to a good read.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62872-679-4
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2016
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
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that...
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett (Free Fire, 2007, etc.), once again at the governor’s behest, stalks the wraithlike figure who’s targeting elk hunters for death.
Frank Urman was taken down by a single rifle shot, field-dressed, beheaded and hung upside-down to bleed out. (You won’t believe where his head eventually turns up.) The poker chip found near his body confirms that he’s the third victim of the Wolverine, a killer whose animus against hunters is evidently being whipped up by anti-hunting activist Klamath Moore. The potential effects on the state’s hunting revenues are so calamitous that Governor Spencer Rulon pulls out all the stops, and Pickett is forced to work directly with Wyoming Game and Fish Director Randy Pope, the boss who fired him from his regular job in Saddlestring District. Three more victims will die in rapid succession before Joe is given a more congenial colleague: Nate Romanowski, the outlaw falconer who pledged to protect Joe’s family before he was taken into federal custody. As usual in this acclaimed series, the mystery is slight and its solution eminently guessable long before it’s confirmed by testimony from an unlikely source. But the people and scenes and enduring conflicts that lead up to that solution will stick with you for a long time.
More of a western than a mystery, like most of Joe’s adventures, and all the better for the open physical clashes that periodically release the tension between the scheming adversaries.Pub Date: May 20, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-15488-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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