The dense, erudite, multiparagraph lectures on microbiology slow down this better-than-average techno-thriller.
Best-selling Japanese author Takano blends cell-manipulating microbiology and pyscho-cultural social analysis, all while sending four men into the Congo to save the human race.
It’s 2004, and President Gregory S. Burns occupies the Oval Office. War in Afghanistan and Iraq, yes, but the Heisman Report says mankind’s biggest threat is a 3-year-old Kanga Pygmy living in Congo’s Ituri Forest. A random mutation created a quantum leap in the boy’s intelligence, and the report says it could lead to the extinction of humankind, much as Homo sapiens wiped out Neanderthals. Shifting from Washington to Congo to Tokyo, Takano’s narrative zigzags from firefights to power-player conferences to the complex biochemical research required to find a treatment for PAECS—pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis. Ex–Special Forces officer Jonathan “Hawk” Yeager quit the Army for big dollar security work to finance his son’s PAECS treatment. Leading Operation Guardian, Yeager believes his team is isolating a viral outbreak, but on the ground, he learns the 40 Kangas with whom the superhuman boy lives are to be assassinated to save the world from his mutation. Anthropologist Nigel Pierce is nurturing the boy, and the child is trying to ensure Yeager won’t kill him by enticing a Tokyo graduate student to formulate a drug to save Yeager’s son. The savant has written GIFT, a program to build and test pharmaceuticals within days rather than years. Japanese racial prejudice gets a rap, but Takano’s villain is the military-industrial complex and the United States’ evolution into Big Brother via Echelon, a program tracking everyone all the time. Takano’s action will appeal to Clancy-philes, but his theme explores how individual psychological frailties shape history, using an administration similar to Bush/Cheney as the bull in the international china shop.
The dense, erudite, multiparagraph lectures on microbiology slow down this better-than-average techno-thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-22622-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that she makes most of her high-wire competition look pallid, formulaic, or just plain fake.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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