An exhilarating, confident novel involving hardy heroes and nefarious bioscience.
A father fights for his missing daughter in this debut biotech thriller.
Saenger parlays his expertise as a pharmaceutical immuno-oncologist in this novel about widowed single father and former SWAT team leader Max Tyler, who becomes embroiled in a nefarious biomedical scheme. While camping in California, his 9-year-old daughter, Megan, is nearly abducted by an unknown assailant; she’s shot with a tranquilizer dart and becomes gravely ill. Infectious disease specialist Beth Collins, at a nearby hospital, enters the picture to care for Megan. Another clumsy attempt to kidnap the girl occurs as Max struggles with Larry Drake, a disgruntled, drug-addled nurse who’s been committing murders at the hospital. Megan is abducted, along with Beth, who’d tried in vain to rescue her. Max holds the remaining kidnapper at gunpoint, and he confesses that Megan was taken to a secret lab. As Max and special ops expert Mark Hunter frantically plot a mission to save the day, Saenger expands his riveting narrative by offering further details about biotechnology company Viralvector and its diabolical “projects” involving Megan, whom they’d initially targeted long ago. Its chief scientist has collected several kids for viral experiments that allow the company to hijack certain youngsters’ brain cells, spur their intellectual advancement, and create prime candidates for stem cell harvesting. The author describes this process and many medical procedures with the ease of a seasoned clinical scientist. Some readers may find his expert explanations of genetic manipulation to be overly complicated, but they do add more intrigue and mystery to the story. Megan, who later teams up with another kidnapped girl, emerges as a tenacious character with plenty of youthful determination. In the end, Saenger’s villains aren’t nearly as wicked and calculating as readers may want them to be. However, the author’s gripping storytelling and characterization—and particularly his riveting conclusion—more than make up for this.
An exhilarating, confident novel involving hardy heroes and nefarious bioscience.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-946920-82-9
Page Count: 306
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
Britisher Swift's sixth novel (Ever After, 1992 etc.) and fourth to appear here is a slow-to-start but then captivating tale of English working-class families in the four decades following WW II. When Jack Dodds dies suddenly of cancer after years of running a butcher shop in London, he leaves a strange request—namely, that his ashes be scattered off Margate pier into the sea. And who could better be suited to fulfill this wish than his three oldest drinking buddies—insurance man Ray, vegetable seller Lenny, and undertaker Vic, all of whom, like Jack himself, fought also as soldiers or sailors in the long-ago world war. Swift's narrative start, with its potential for the melodramatic, is developed instead with an economy, heart, and eye that release (through the characters' own voices, one after another) the story's humanity and depth instead of its schmaltz. The jokes may be weak and self- conscious when the three old friends meet at their local pub in the company of the urn holding Jack's ashes; but once the group gets on the road, in an expensive car driven by Jack's adoptive son, Vince, the story starts gradually to move forward, cohere, and deepen. The reader learns in time why it is that no wife comes along, why three marriages out of three broke apart, and why Vince always hated his stepfather Jack and still does—or so he thinks. There will be stories of innocent youth, suffering wives, early loves, lost daughters, secret affairs, and old antagonisms—including a fistfight over the dead on an English hilltop, and a strewing of Jack's ashes into roiling seawaves that will draw up feelings perhaps unexpectedly strong. Without affectation, Swift listens closely to the lives that are his subject and creates a songbook of voices part lyric, part epic, part working-class social realism—with, in all, the ring to it of the honest, human, and true.
Pub Date: April 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-41224-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1996
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