A supernatural thriller with an intriguing premise but uneven execution.
In Harrison’s speculative mystery, a young woman anxiously searches for her missing sister in a disaster-struck city with the help of a jaded detective.
Six months after a catastrophic explosion destroyed a downtown New York nightclub, a huge swath of the city is still designated a Quarantine Zone, ostensibly because of biological or chemical contamination from a secret military facility beneath the club. The QZ is heavily guarded and under continuous drone surveillance, and incidents of unexplained, unprovoked violence multiply; a mysterious blogger, Ominosity, spreads a sinister warning that “things are not under control.” In this dismal setting, a young woman named Miki Preston searches for her missing sister, Jennifer, a talented photojournalist. Miki keeps glimpsing phantom faces that seem to be screaming, but which vanish upon second glance. She sees the same shadows in the backgrounds of Jennifer’s last photos, taken at the scenes of suicides and murders; Jennifer saved the images in a folder labeled “In Case Something Happens To Me.” Miki tries to convince world-weary police Detective Levi Mathis to help her find Jennifer, but he warns her off. Mathis is looking for answers of his own; his teenage daughter was killed in the nightclub blast, and he suspects that authorities are using the QZ to cover up criminal activity. Harrison weaves in subplots involving a colorful pair of street kids, elements of Mathis’ past, mobsters, clandestine psychological experiments, and covert intelligence to effectively create an ominous world. The setting is a gritty New York City, full of dark alleys and dank tunnels. However, its geography will be confusing to readers familiar with the real-life city; for example, 10th Avenue and 24th Street is in the Chelsea neighborhood, not Soho, and 7th Avenue is west of 8th Street, not north of it. The story timeframe is also distractingly unclear; there’s a passing reference to “Bloomberg’s nanny campaign,” for instance, and people have smartphones, but don’t seem to use them to communicate. Still, the writing flows quickly, despite occasional repetitions, and the ending hints at the possibility of a sequel.
A supernatural thriller with an intriguing premise but uneven execution.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781680577372
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Wordfire Press LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.
In this long-awaited fifth installment of Shannon’s Bone Season series, the threat to the clairvoyant community spreads like a plague across Europe.
After extending her fight against the Republic of Scion to Paris, Paige Mahoney, leader of London’s clairvoyant underworld and a spy for the resistance movement, finds herself further outside her comfort zone when she wakes up in a foreign place with no recollection of getting there. More disturbing than her last definitive memory, in which her ally-turned-lover Arcturus seems to betray her, is that her dreamscape—the very soul of her clairvoyance—has been altered, as if there’s a veil shrouding both her memories and abilities. Paige manages to escape and learns she’s been missing and presumed dead for six months. Even more shocking is that she’s somehow outside of Scion’s borders, in the free world where clairvoyants are accepted citizens. She gets in touch with other resistance fighters and journeys to Italy to reconnect with the Domino Programme intelligence network. In stark contrast to the potential of life in the free world is the reality that Scion continues to stretch its influence, with Norway recently falling and Italy a likely next target. Paige is enlisted to discover how Scion is bending free-world political leaders to its will, but before Paige can commit to her mission, she has her own mystery to solve: Where in the world is Arcturus? Paige’s loyalty to Arcturus is tested as she decides how much to trust in their connection and how much information to reveal to the Domino Programme about the Rephaite—the race of immortals from the Netherworld, Arcturus’ people—and their connection to the founding of Scion, as well as the presence of clairvoyant abilities on Earth. While the book is impressively multilayered, the matter-of-fact way in which details from the past are sprinkled throughout will have readers constantly flipping to the glossary. As the series’ scope and the implications of the war against Scion expand, Shannon’s narrative style reads more action-thriller than fantasy. Paige’s powers as a dreamwalker are rarely used here, but when clairvoyance is at play, the story shines.
Though it falters a bit under its own weight, this series still has plenty of fight left.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781639733965
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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