An underdeveloped and unpolished thriller.
In Marson’s debut novel with SF elements, a girl attempts to foil the evil plots of the criminals who raised her.
Katie grows up in New York City, the child of British tech entrepreneurs James and Rebecca, who’ve grown immensely wealthy developing disruptive technologies related to cloning and robotics. Unfortunately for the 5-year-old protagonist, she’s forced to spend most of her time in the company of physically abusive nanny Sherry Shames, who burns her with cigarettes and injects her with sedatives to keep her subdued. When Rebecca realizes what’s going on, she fires Sherry, but soon afterward, the family becomes a target. Rebecca is driven off the road while on vacation and severely injured; the family’s house is robbed; and James’ company is hacked. Things continue to escalate, and soon Katie is kidnapped by Sherry and her accomplice—the professor Manico Tronic. Sherry and her husband, Gabe, raise Katie as their own, later passing her off as their murdered daughter. Manico slowly brainwashes an army of college students with drugs and alcohol to do his bidding. Believing her own parents are dead, Katie resigns herself to her new life, participating passively in the criminal enterprises that Sherry and Gabe run using her parents’ stolen technology—she feels as if she’s in “a constant, turbulent storm living with Gabe and Sherry. She was owned by this family.” When Katie is eventually recruited by the Federal Investigation Agency right out of college, however, she has an opportunity to get back at the people who ruined her life. As Manico launches terror attacks against governments and corporations, Katie may be the only one equipped to bring him to justice. But is it already too late to save the world from Manico’s plan to bend all of society to his will?
Marson displays a great deal of imagination over the course of this novel, particularly when it comes to the various technologies at play, such as a project of James’, introduced early on, which effectively allows users to “reprogram” other people’s minds. Unfortunately, the book’s ideas are overshadowed by the rough quality of the writing. The prose is littered with awkward syntax and clunky sentence structure: “Katie woke up sweating from the night terrors and flashbacks of Sherry and what transpired took a toll on Katie physiologically as much as she consciously buried the horrifying thoughts of Sherry haunting her.” This lack of clarity is likely to keep many readers from feeling engaged with the story. There are relatively few memorable scenes, with much of the story told as expository summary, giving the novel a discursive shapelessness. The characters are thinly drawn, and it’s difficult to make out their motivations. Marson also litters the plot with gratuitous violence and abuse, particularly toward Katie, but makes no real attempt to explore its emotional effects. There are plenty of ideas here that could have been further explored, and the book would have benefited from a much stronger edit to bring them to the fore.
An underdeveloped and unpolished thriller.Pub Date: March 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66555-149-6
Page Count: 242
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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