A timely spinoff thriller with series potential in its own right.
A young graduate student suspects that a corporation will use her game-changing, apocalyptic anthropological research for nefarious purposes in a new novel by Gear and Gear.
The authors expand their Anasazi thriller series, which began with Bone Walker (2008), to introduce 27-year-old Dr. Anika French, who’s developed a revolutionary computer model that could allow archaeologists to understand exactly why history’s greatest civilizations collapsed. After Dr. Mark Schott, Anika’s committee chair and former lover, partners with the shady ECSITE corporation, he makes her a financially irresistible offer to take her on as his research assistant. He insists that ECSITE will only use her research for humanitarian purposes. “I have the gut feeling that something’s wrong about this, Mark,” she tells him, but she accepts, nonetheless. However, Schott steals her research for an article in a scholarly journal, “THE COLLAPSE OF THE NATION-STATE: A PREDICTIVE STATISTICAL MODEL,” which captures the attention of both the FBI and the U.S. Department of Defense, and they bring Anika in to lead an elite team to investigate what Schott and ECSITE may be up to. The team includes the star of Gear and Gear’s series, anthropologist Maureen Cole (with an assist from archaeologist Dusty Stewart), and bodyguard Skip Murphy. Early on, Stewart states he will miss the days when “all we had to do was worry about Navajo witches and prehistoric serial killers,” and, indeed, readers should be aware going in that this is not Indiana Jones–style archaeology; this is “stochastically modeled statistical probability” and “correlation coefficients” archeology. However, there’s also plenty of danger and well-calibrated suspense to go along with the complicated lingo of the trade. As a character, Schott is merely, as Dusty terms him, a “swine,” but ECSITE CEO Mikael Zoakalski ably fills the void as a despicable villain, and the brilliant Anika develops some fine heroic chops over the course of the novel.
A timely spinoff thriller with series potential in its own right.Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63977-006-9
Page Count: 314
Publisher: Wolfpack Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
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