While the science is intriguing, the ridiculously high body count feels gratuitous and comes at the cost of much-needed...
A young girl holds the key to an explosive, decades-old mind-control experiment gone wrong in Thomas’ debut thriller.
When 11-year-old Ashanique Walters claims to “see” the death of Pvt. George Edwin Ellison, a soldier who died in Belgium in 1918, Ashanique’s mother, Janice—who, as a child, was the subject of an experiment to alter memories called Project Clarity—knows that Ashanique will need help soon. The visions will get worse, eventually overwhelming her and driving her insane. When Dr. Matilda Deacon, a University of Chicago professor who has been working to unlock the mysteries of memory, hears about Ashanique, she's intrigued by the girl's mind-blowing tale. Unfortunately, because of Matilda’s visit, word of Ashanique’s visions gets to the people Janice fears the most, and Janice knows they’ll have to run. Janice is good at this—she’s been on the run from the Clarity scientists for 20 years. When knife-wielding men in scrubs, dubbed the “Night Doctors,” come for her and Ashanique, they escape and head to Matilda’s workplace, where Janice hopes to find a supply of MetroChime, which will keep Ashanique’s visions at bay. Rade, an ultracreepy assassin who’s convinced he’s more than human, is given the job of bringing Janice in, convinced she alone possesses something they call the "solution." When Rade captures Janice, Matilda takes Ashanique and goes on the run to protect her. Rade is close behind, and he doesn’t hesitate to kill anyone in his way. There might be people who can help Ashanique, if she and Matilda can make it to them alive. Luckily, they have intrepid homicide detective Kojo Omaboe, who also sees something special in Ashanique, on their side. The idea of accessing past lives and memories is an intriguing one, but the precise goal of the experimentation isn't made clear. Glimpses of Ashanique's visions into the lives of various people of the past, such as a family that lived more than a million years ago and a young boy in 17th-century India, don’t do much to lift this out of generic hunt-and-chase territory.
While the science is intriguing, the ridiculously high body count feels gratuitous and comes at the cost of much-needed character development. Empty thrills.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5693-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Leopoldo & Co/ Atria
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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