Plenty of imagination, with a peek at plausible near-future technology.
This sixth in Child’s Jeremy Logan series pits the vaunted enigmatologist against high-tech evil.
A scientist falls, with the help of an ax in his back, down a deep crevasse on an Alaskan glacier. Later, a business mogul suffers an apoplectic, bloody death in a Manhattan business meeting. Then a Beechcraft pilot fatally crashes for no obvious reason. All three are members of the board of directors for the mega-company named Chrysalis, and the connection among their sudden demises is a mystery. So the company urgently requests the assistance of Jeremy Logan, a paranormal sleuth who has at least five major successes under his belt. He drives his Lotus to a facility hidden deep in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. It’s a highly secure, secret building shaped like a torus, or doughnut. There, he meets with both techs and execs and receives complete authority to investigate—to ask any question of anyone inside the complex. Chrysalis is about to launch the newest version of its Venture product, and they are afraid that someone has programmed it to kill its users. Meanwhile, Logan is highly enamored of their current technology and already uses a virtual assistant called Pythia until his equipment is upgraded to the silken-voiced and ever so helpful Grace. “Grace, you’re a peach,” he tells her. “No, Jeremy,” she replies, “I am a virtual assistant.” It happens that the torus contains “a nest of fire ants,” and as Logan pokes and prods, people continue to die. What hath Chrysalis wrought? A killing machine? Whatever malware might drive the new device, humans amply supplement with intra-doughnut gunfights. Grace, Logan, and the dead mogul stand out among the characters, while the others make a lesser impression. Logan’s fans won’t be disappointed—and it’s an enjoyable stand-alone thriller, so it’s not necessary to read the series in order.
Plenty of imagination, with a peek at plausible near-future technology.Pub Date: July 12, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-385-54367-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
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
A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.
A British witch takes a job as a magic tutor and finds the place she belongs.
Mika Moon's parents died when she was a child, and she's spent her entire adult life moving every few months, never staying in one place for long or getting attached to anyone. At 31, she’s been raised to keep magic secret; her sole contact with other witches is a small group she sees every three months, and she can't even text with them in between, as the group's leader thinks having too much magic in one place will draw unwanted attention. Mika does, however, do one thing that skates the edges of propriety: She posts online videos in which she "pretends" to be a witch: "Witchcore....Not quite as popular as cottagecore or fairycore, but it's up there." Then she gets an interesting request in her DMs, and Mika finds herself at Nowhere House, an old country estate, teaching three orphaned children how to control their magic. Suddenly surrounded by people who not only know her secret, but accept her for it, Mika is dangerously close to getting attached, both to the girls she’s teaching and to their caretakers, including Jamie, the cute librarian who didn't want to send for her. But with the clock ticking until an upcoming visit from a lawyer who's suspicious about the “unconventional household” and the witch rules Mika’s been raised with ringing in her ears, is this all just a bomb waiting to explode? The world Mandanna has created is exceedingly cozy and heartfelt, full of people bursting with love who have trouble expressing it due to trauma in their pasts. From the three magical girls to the elderly gay caretakers to the hot, young Irish librarian, each resident of Nowhere House is a lovingly crafted outcast reaching for family. Various threads laid out seemingly haphazardly through the story all come together in surprising ways in the last 30 pages for a finale worthy of the tale that preceded it.
A magical tale about finding yourself and making a found family that will leave the reader enchanted.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-43935-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
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