Well-produced, pleasingly peopled, with a strong narrative and plenty of provocative plot lines: a superb beginning to the...
Contemporary fantasy meets urban noir in Richardson’s intriguing debut.
Following a savage assault, PI Harper Blaine lies clinically dead for two minutes. When she recovers, her perception of Seattle will never be the same. Along with mundane reality, she sees blowing grey mist and people who aren’t solid. Fearing for her sanity, she consults university professor Mara Danziger, who claims to be a witch. Mara tells confused, disbelieving Harper that the grey mist is the paranormal dimension, occupied by ghosts, monsters and other unspeakable things. Harper’s head injury has turned her into a “greywalker” who can not only perceive the grey but touch and enter it—if she has the skill and the courage. Mara’s resident ghost, Albert, isn’t too scary, but both of Harper’s current cases take alarming paranormal twists. Missing college kid Cameron Shadley has been transformed into a vampire. Cameron’s problem, aside from his overprotective mother, is that the vampire who bit him didn’t bother to provide the requisite survival skills. Harper’s other client, the sinister Grigori Sergeyev, manages to phone her office even when the phone line is down. Sergeyev wants her to recover a missing heirloom that, it transpires, is a focus of terrible necromantic power. Love interest Will Novak, an auctioneer, suspects his boss is ripping him off. And electronics whiz and fix-it guy Quinton, whom Harper consults after her office is broken into, clearly knows more than he’s telling. To solve both cases, Harper may be forced to combine them—as well as learn how to survive inside the grey itself.
Well-produced, pleasingly peopled, with a strong narrative and plenty of provocative plot lines: a superb beginning to the series that’s unquestionably in the offing.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-451-46107-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: ROC/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.
Second part of an alien-contact trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, 2014) from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.
In the previous book, the inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet with three suns, discovered that their planet was doomed and that Earth offered a suitable refuge. So, determined to capture Earth and exterminate humanity, the Trisolarans embarked on a 400-year-long interstellar voyage and also sent sophons (enormously sophisticated computers constructed inside the curled-up dimensions of fundamental particles) to spy on humanity and impose an unbreakable block on scientific advance. On Earth, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization formed to help the invaders, despite knowing the inevitable outcome. Humanity’s lone advantage is that Trisolarans are incapable of lying or dissimulation and so cannot understand deceit or subterfuge. This time, with the Trisolarans a few years into their voyage, physicist Ye Wenjie (whose reminiscences drove much of the action in the last book) visits astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji, urging him to develop her ideas on cosmic sociology. The Planetary Defense Council, meanwhile, in order to combat the powerful escapist movement (they want to build starships and flee so that at least some humans will survive), announces the Wallfacer Project. Four selected individuals will be accorded the power to command any resource in order to develop plans to defend Earth, while the details will remain hidden in the thoughts of each Wallfacer, where even the sophons can't reach. To combat this, the ETO creates Wallbreakers, dedicated to deducing and thwarting the plans of the Wallfacers. The chosen Wallfacers are soldier Frederick Tyler, diplomat Manuel Rey Diaz, neuroscientist Bill Hines, and—Luo Ji. Luo has no idea why he was chosen, but, nonetheless, the Trisolarans seem determined to kill him. The plot’s development centers on Liu’s dark and rather gloomy but highly persuasive philosophy, with dazzling ideas and an unsettling, nonlinear, almost nonnarrative structure that demands patience but offers huge rewards.
Once again, a highly impressive must-read.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7653-7708-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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