This science-heavy mystery isn’t as smart as it would like to be.
When a junkie dies, no one bothers to ask questions—except her daughter.
Six weeks have passed since Faith found her addict mother dead in their West Philly apartment, but she still hasn’t settled into her new life with her aunt in the suburbs. Already troubled by lingering doubts about her mother’s apparent overdose, Faith begins to search for hard answers after she discovers her mother was secretly participating in a clinical trial for a new treatment for heroin addiction. Though Faith’s reluctant to share her troubles with her aunt and her perky best friend, she finds a confidant—and romantic interest—in Jesse, a new student with a rebellious streak. Debut novelist Chodosh provides plenty of detail as Faith delves into the world of big-money medical research and gene therapy, but the science and mystery fall as flat as the unconvincing dialogue. Faith’s research never actually feels like the start of a genuine passion for the subject, and most of the progress she makes in her investigation comes through good luck rather than actual deductions. Astute readers will guess the truth behind her mother’s death long before the improbable denouement.
This science-heavy mystery isn’t as smart as it would like to be. (Mystery. 12-17)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-9293-4500-7
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Poisoned Pencil
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Hooked readers will be tapping their fingers waiting for the sequel.
Reichs follows up his Virals series (co-written with his mother, Kathy Reichs) with a new series about imminent human extinction.
Min is not your average 16-year-old. Living in a trailer park in an isolated town high in the mountains of Idaho, she’s learned to keep pretty much to herself. She has a mother who loves her and a best friend, Tack, who’d like to be more, but she knows they can’t understand what she’s going through. Every two years on her birthday, she’s murdered. And every two years she comes back, completely unharmed. She’s tried to escape the inevitable but knows it’s only a matter of time before the man in black returns for her. Now things are getting worse, with an asteroid headed toward Earth. Will this be it, the real end of her life? Just when she’s found that classmate Noah is having the same strange experiences she’s tried to keep hidden? Reichs varies his narrative structure, opening with Min’s present-day account, interspersed with italicized flashbacks, and then switching to Noah, whose account is punctuated by transcripts with the doctor he shares with Min, before their stories converge in alternating chapters. It’s a pacing strategy that keeps the pages flipping madly. Min, Tack, and Noah are all evidently white.
Hooked readers will be tapping their fingers waiting for the sequel. (Thriller. 12-16)Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-54493-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Slow off the mark and gratuitously violent but cooking with (nerve) gas by the end.
With help from a reclusive billionaire, teen supersoldiers tackle a cyberterrorist in this sequel to Camp Valor (2018).
The main suspense comes from wondering when the chases and firefights are finally going to start. Traumatized by the discovery that he’s been duped into mowing down a crowd of real pedestrians in what he thought was a virtual truck, online gamer Jalen Rose is recruited by Valorian agent and co-protagonist Wyatt to join him in an unauthorized mission to find the instigator, Encyte. There are suspects aplenty. Their patron, tech tycoon John Darsie, points them toward one possibility: his own employee Julie Chen, a brilliant (not to mention “tough and a little boyish, but cute”) 14-year-old gamer and software designer. Despite a series of cyber exploits, including a high-casualty riot fueled by pheromones, there are so many distracting subplots—notably the hunt for a traitor from the first volume, the arrival of a government official who orders the camp shut down because she can’t see the value of a cadre of secretly trained child warriors (go figure), and a developing relationship between Jalen and Julie—that the pedal doesn’t really hit the metal until some time after the real villain makes a tardy first entrance. Jalen is African American and Wyatt is white.
Slow off the mark and gratuitously violent but cooking with (nerve) gas by the end. (Paramilitary thriller. 12-16)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-08825-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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