A futuristic medical thriller with keen medical details and fast pacing.
In Lycette’s speculative novel set in the year 2035, medical diagnoses are made not by medical professionals but by an artificial-intelligence algorithm—and one doctor has serious questions about it.
Dr. Hope Kestrel is the “High Resident” at the Seattle-based hospital Prognostic Intelligent Medical Algorithms and the front-runner for a post-residency position. PRIMA is on the verge of a merger with Seattle Healthcare Associates, and its diagnostic technology is seemingly without error. But when a patient (called a Patron under the new system) is erroneously admitted onto her service, Hope begins an investigation that leads her and her new intern, Jacie Stone, into a web of lies and corporate greed. It appears that PRIMA only admits Patrons that they’re certain will survive, while others are sent to a hospice-style facility. As Hope begins to question the algorithm, she’s penalized in the resident-ranking system and soon placed on leave. With Jacie’s help, they access the internal data to discover a dark secret in the algorithm creation. Over the course of this brisk novel, Lycette creates a very near future that readers will find to be fleshed out and tangible in its portrait of a near-future American health care system. The medical side of the story feels authentic throughout. However, there are times when the novel veers into too many topical issues, none of which are ever fully resolved. There are understandable mentions of the Covid-19 pandemic (called the “catalyst which led to the end of the previous broken system—health insurance tied to employment”), medical racial bias, sexism, and reproductive freedom, but these aspects don’t further the main story in significant ways and sometimes even distract from it. The overall emotional framework of the novel, in which Hope and Jacie are driven by their families’ experiences with cancer, may feel familiar, but it does make the main players more relatable.
A futuristic medical thriller with keen medical details and fast pacing.Pub Date: March 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781685131494
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.
Set in the future and reminiscent of The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones, this novel dramatizes a story of vengeance, warfare and the quest for power.
In the beginning, Darrow, the narrator, works in the mines on Mars, a life of drudgery and subservience. He’s a member of the Reds, an “inferior” class, though he’s happily married to Eo, an incipient rebel who wants to overthrow the existing social order, especially the Golds, who treat the lower-ranking orders cruelly. When Eo leads him to a mildly rebellious act, she’s caught and executed, and Darrow decides to exact vengeance on the perpetrators of this outrage. He’s recruited by a rebel cell and “becomes” a Gold by having painful surgery—he has golden wings grafted on his back—and taking an exam to launch himself into the academy that educates the ruling elite. Although he successfully infiltrates the Golds, he finds the social order is a cruel and confusing mash-up of deception and intrigue. Eventually, he leads one of the “houses” in war games that are all too real and becomes a guerrilla warrior leading a ragtag band of rebelliously minded men and women. Although it takes a while, the reader eventually gets used to the specialized vocabulary of this world, where warriors shoot “pulseFists” and are protected by “recoilArmor.” As with many similar worlds, the warrior culture depicted here has a primitive, even classical, feel to it, especially since the warriors sport names such as Augustus, Cassius, Apollo and Mercury.
A fine novel for those who like to immerse themselves in alternative worlds.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-345-53978-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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