A propulsive and all-too-timely near-future thriller.
It’s been about three years since HCV, a fatal cancer-causing virus targeting men, began sweeping the world.
Now, in 2023, there's no cure in sight and reproduction has been made illegal to cut down on further infections in baby boys. Men and boys are hot commodities to both the interim government and other distinctly unsavory parties, but Cole isn’t about to surrender her 12-year-old son, Miles, who seems to be immune, to anyone. In fact, the only thing she cares about is getting home to Johannesburg, South Africa, but it won’t be easy. While in the U.S. visiting family, Cole’s husband, Devon, died, and Cole and Miles were herded into army quarantine, where Miles, under the auspices of the Male Protection Act, endured a seemingly endless series of tests. But Cole just wants to go home, and soon after they're moved to a new bunker, she and her sister, Billie, who reunited with Cole and Miles at the military base after a job as executive chef on a superyacht went south, hatch an escape plan. But the conniving Billie doesn’t have their best interests in mind, and Cole is forced to resort to violence. Now Cole and Miles, disguised as “Mila,” are on the run. Meanwhile, Billie, sporting a nasty head injury courtesy of a Cole-wielded tire iron, must find Miles and deliver him to the very bad women she works for or they’ll kill her. An already hellish road trip takes a strange turn when Miles and an exhausted Cole, seeking any kind of respite, join up with the nomadic nuns of the Church of All Sorrows, a cultish order that believes men will return if women would only repent for an endless litany of sins. Cole has a plan, but getting to the departure point alive will test her—and her relationship with her son—to the very limit. Miles and his mom form the beating heart of a harrowing tale that ably explores grief, motherhood, and gender roles, and Cole’s struggle to protect Miles as he grapples with coming-of-age in a radically altered world will resonate. Beukes is a gifted storyteller who makes it thrillingly easy for readers to fall under her spell as she weaves a hypnotic vision of a fractured world without men.
A propulsive and all-too-timely near-future thriller.Pub Date: July 28, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-26783-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Mulholland Books/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2020
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
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
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