An intriguing, character-driven mystery/thriller with outer-space trappings.
In the blastoff of a new SF series, a manned Mars mission meets disaster after astronauts retrieve an incredible relic.
By 2040, Earth has been partially healed of its environmental devastation thanks to the inventions of South African tycoon Luther Karlhammer, whose foundation made the first manned Mars mission possible. The space shot highlighted a sharp division between people who want to explore space and those more concerned with Earth; the latter include the militant-terrorist Sons of Terra. The Mars mission aborts and returns to Earth, crashing into the ocean and leaving one amnesiac survivor, Filio Amorosa. There was an organic relic called “The Object” onboard, found on the red planet, which went missing in the crash. Over the next two years, a search for the Object continues, and Filio tries to join another Mars mission. Flashbacks to 2018 follow Dan Jackson, a maverick archaeologist determined to prove that the human race is far older than previously thought. To that end, he enters a pyramid-shaped anomaly in Antarctica built by unknown parties millions of years ago. Jackson’s unfinished manuscript ties in with the manifesto of the Sons of Terra, and Agatha Devenworth and Pano Hofer, two Europol agents, attempt to retrace the missing scientist’s steps. Shadowing them is a mysterious man in black with frightening powers. The narrative piles enigma upon enigma in commendable fashion for about four-fifths of the novel, then finally reveals some answers in a lively denouement with an open ending that points to the next volume. No shortage of questions remain, however. Fans of SF should also be aware that, in this installment, the off-planet action is kept to a minimum. There’s also little hard-science speculation, although there’s a glossary of terms included at the end. Still, there are some good shudder-inducing moments as well as instances of science-fictional awe and wonder.
An intriguing, character-driven mystery/thriller with outer-space trappings.Pub Date: March 4, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-71-675536-9
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
