by Linda Mahkovec ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 2016
An engrossing, if subdued, psychological tale.
In this novel, a woman’s search for meaning takes on new urgency when a stranger takes up residence in her garden house.
Miranda is a recent empty nester who isn’t quite sure where to devote her time and energy now that her children are out in the world. She decides to fix up the garden house on her property to use as an art studio—she used to paint before giving it up to be a wife and mother—but when she mentions her idea to her husband, Ben, she learns the building is soon to be inhabited. Unbeknown to Miranda, Ben has rented out the garden house to William Priestly, a somewhat mysterious friend of a friend. “A teacher or journalist or something,” says Ben. “From out East. New York, I think.” At first, Miranda is just happy that the garden house is in use—but then her sleep begins to be disturbed by unpleasant dreams. Ben thinks Miranda’s nightmares—which frequently involve children and shadowy predators—are inspired by her trips dropping some things off at the local teen shelter. As Miranda begins to notice William’s strange behavior—his odd hours, his comings and goings—she can’t help but wonder if he has something to do with her visions. After all, what do they really know about this stranger? Mahkovec’s prose is sharp and fluid, building tension in small domestic scenes: Miranda “heard a car door slam and went to look out the bedroom window. William had parked in the rear of the garden house. When he opened the back door, golden lamp light poured outside, and then disappeared when he shut the door.” The premise is a fun one, and Miranda is a finely drawn character, believable even as she treads frequently into the realm of clichés. The author does not take as many risks with the plot as readers would like, but neither does she deliver the sort of traditional thriller that the audience expects. She delves thoughtfully into empty nest syndrome and midlife evaluations, but the novel never really gets as dark as it seems like it wants to be. The result, while not disappointing, is not completely satisfying either.
An engrossing, if subdued, psychological tale.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-946229-12-0
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Bublish, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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by Elliot Ackerman & James Stavridis ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2024
A game effort at a tough theme.
The Singularity may become the new ultimate weapon in the aftermath of a nuclear debacle.
If the page-and-a-half prologue doesn’t stop the reader cold, nothing will. It begins: “If a beam of light / energy / open + / close— / reopen == / repeat / stop...” Stop, indeed. This will prompt only the geekiest among us to move on to Chapter 1. But do turn the page. In 2054, the U.S. is in turmoil. Two decades earlier, China nuked San Diego and Galveston while the U.S. inflicted the same on Shanghai and Shenzhen. In the aftermath, the two countries no longer dominate the world, and traditional U.S. political parties are no more. The current action begins when the physically fit President Ángel Castro collapses while giving a speech, prompting “malicious rumors that the president had suffered some sort of health crisis.” He had, and he dies. Of course, there are profound suspicions over his sudden demise. Was the president’s aorta inflamed by a sequence of computer code, à la the prologue? Is he a victim of “remote gene editing” by an unknown entity? Hence the inklings of the 21st century’s new existential threat, a race to achieve the Singularity, where—to oversimplify—technology and humanity become one. The cast includes some holdovers from the authors’ last book, 2034, including Dr. Sandy Chowdhury and Julia Hunt, a woman born in China with allegiance to the U.S. But key is the elusive (and nonfictional) Dr. Ray Kurzweil, thought to be living in Brazil. Meanwhile, American society threatens to explode into civil war between Dreamers and Truthers. But if the ultimate threat to humanity is the Singularity, it doesn’t come through convincingly on these pages. In 2034, the stakes were brutally clear, with millions of lives on the line. Two decades hence, they’re mushier—serious to be sure, but tougher to wrap up into a thriller. With apologies to T. S. Eliot: This is the way the book ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.
A game effort at a tough theme.Pub Date: March 12, 2024
ISBN: 9780593489864
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
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