A light and whimsical sci-fi whodunit with a college campus backdrop.
In this sequel, a physics teacher becomes a prime suspect when a colleague’s death cues a new wave of crimes inspired by mental feats of quantum reality-bending.
Imagine if Janet Evanovich had given Stephanie Plum a science-teaching degree and you might have a handle on the series that began with Quantum Cop (2016). It’s been more than a year since young Boulder, Colorado, college instructor Madison Martin learned that with a little mind power, adrenaline, and physics, just about anyone can alter reality via “q-lapsing”: choosing a preferred outcome from quantum-uncertainty particle/wave duality. In practical terms, that means teleportation, transmutation of matter, telekinesis, and other wizardlike stuff (hard and fast ground rules of q-lapsing are weak at best). In the first book, a nationwide outbreak of “quantum crimes” resulted from a small number of Madison’s avaricious students misusing the talent. Now readers are told all of that has largely been forgotten or covered up (which seems almost as unlikely as q-lapse itself). Then a science colleague Madison didn’t even know turns up dead on campus, horribly murdered, and police suspect her. Meanwhile, Madison’s passionate faculty lover, Andro Rivas—whom she secretly taught q-lapse—has begun acting moody and distant without explanation. Is he a part of the crime? Are the undergraduate villains who were defeated in Quantum Cop somehow back again? Will the hunky new policeman with a stellar body who’s on the case exert a sexier gravitational pull on Madison than unpredictable Andro? There are some clever red herrings and feints here, if perhaps one too many trips to the well of characters and incidents from the first novel. Demarcations between rom-com silliness and the deadly serious are often as indistinct as the ones separating particles and waveforms. Smith (Kat Cubed, 2016, etc.) is a physicist in real life (following up the narrative with a short essay on quantum-mechanical weirdness), and she skillfully flavors the far-fetched stuff with references to such concepts as eigenvalues and the Bose-Einstein Condensate. The temptation is to say that things flip between the quirky and the quarky. But sci-fi fans who like their chick-lit thrillers blended with a Ph.D. should find the formula enjoyable.
A light and whimsical sci-fi whodunit with a college campus backdrop.Pub Date: June 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9861350-4-0
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Quarky Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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