A fresh addition to an enjoyable series.
Continuation of Freemartin’s (The Currents of Scorpio: The Zodiac Mysteries Book 3, 2014) Zodiac Mystery series featuring the Cuspians, women reviled for having been born on the cusp of two zodiac signs.
After fleeing the pampered, glamorous world of her two adoptive fathers, former perfume designer Nina Solaris is trying to build a new, meaningful life for herself in Fiamma on an Earth-like planet called Astrogea. Zeven, one of her fathers, had discovered Nina and her unusual gift for detecting and identifying odors, then put her to work creating scents; but after seeing the accomplishments of her Cuspian friends, Nina believes hers are empty. Alienated and isolated due to her Cuspian status—in her case, having been born on the cusp between Leo and Virgo (as good a reason as any to discriminate in dystopian 2045 Astrogea)—Nina is attempting to initiate chemical warfare by developing and distributing pheromone tabs which will alter the behaviors—and, seemingly, the astrological signs—of those who consume them: “Nina smiled and wondered how the brash and haughty Aries would feel when strangers started thinking of her as a water sign, when her friends and family looked at her in confusion, ill at ease.” On the brink of the new year, however, additional threats are developing against Fiamma as charismatic Winn Noble’s Cult of Leo infiltrates the fabric of the city. Nina enlists the help of her five Cuspian friends—Vivian, Margo, Jade, Iris, and Brooke—each with her own talents and shortcomings. Even (especially) among her dearest friends, Nina’s old feelings of inadequacy rise to the surface, making her vulnerable to Winn’s charisma. At the same time, she realizes she can’t trust her new ally, Cedric, nor her old and new lovers (Lionel Savage and Luc Windham, respectively). Adding to the expanding conflict is the unpredictable behavior of Cuspians as well as Paragons—astrological purists, who have political sway—resulting from intentional or unintentional consumption of the pheromone tabs Nina herself created. Rather than making a positive contribution to her society’s plight, Nina suspects she is contributing to its downfall. A dizzying number of characters and subplots makes this otherwise straightforward dystopian novel confusing, although probably less so for devotees of the entire series. While Nina and her friends attempt to foil Winn’s ambitions, they leave an intriguing number of unresolved issues to guarantee the perpetuation of the series.
A fresh addition to an enjoyable series.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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