An entertaining first entry in what promises to be a fantastic time-travel series.
A ragtag team of archaeology experts find themselves at the center of a battle for humankind’s survival in Rothman and Butler’s supernatural thriller.
Present-day Egyptologist Marty Cohen joins a secret, privately financed dig in Egypt’s Nabta Playa after his friend and German archaeologist Gunther Mueller tantalizingly tells him that they found hieroglyphs that predate any known writing from the region. The expedition, led by eccentric French millionaire François Garnier, also includes Indigenous Australian biological anthropologist Lowanna Lancaster; security expert Surjan Singh, a former member of India’s special forces; and Egyptian dig specialists Abdullah bin Rahman and his nephew Kareem. When Marty finally sees the hieroglyphs in a tunnel leading to a mysterious chamber, he’s dumbfounded to find something that shouldn’t be there: English-language text. Just then, the members of the expedition are suddenly transported to another place, across the Sahara—and back in time, thousands of years. As they journey across the desert in an attempt to find their way back home, they meet new friends and foes; among the latter are monsters with jackal heads and human bodies that looks suspiciously like the god Seth. The team soon discover that the future is in danger—and that they’re the only ones who can save it. This highly enjoyable novel by Rothman and Butler is full of nonstop action, bits of science, mystery, humor, and enough Ancient Egypt trivia to satisfy any history enthusiast. The quest narrative and the Dungeons & Dragons–style team structure recall familiar fantasy tropes, but the authors manage to develop the characters well, giving them each their own distinct arcs, and it results in a tale that’s well worth reading. The overarching mystery keeps the pages turning in an adventure tale that refreshingly shows respect for ancient civilizations and their accomplishments.
An entertaining first entry in what promises to be a fantastic time-travel series.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-982192-48-8
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Baen
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
First-timer Solvinic provides more questions than answers in a messy, compelling tale.
Or The Killer’s Daughter, since the heroine’s father was executed years ago for strangling 27 women.
That’s a formidable legacy to deal with, and Det. Lt. Anna Koray, of the Midwestern Bayern County Sheriff’s Office, has always struggled to keep her head above water. After her father, Stephen Theron, was identified as the Forest Strangler and arrested and her mother, Sheila Fredericks Theron, put her up for adoption and went into the Witness Protection Program, Elena Theron took the name of her loving foster parents and continued what turned into years of therapy with psychiatrist Barbara Richardson. The demons she’s kept at bay come roaring back when, called to a scene of domestic abuse, she kills the husband who’s already shot his wife to death and tries to do the same to Anna. The attendant trauma leads to uneasy reunions with Nick Kohler, an ER doctor who’d wanted more than she could give, and with Dr. Richardson, who succeeds in unlocking the vault of Anna’s repressed memories. All this is a prelude to the main event: the discovery of another series of female corpses arranged as ceremoniously as Stephen Theron’s victims. Are these murders the work of a copycat killer, or of Veles, the Forest God? Since the rare DNA variant Theron carried has turned up on the new crime scenes, is it possible that he wasn’t executed after all but escaped? Or could Anna, who’s surely carrying that variant herself, be unwittingly channeling the spirit of her father or of Veles?
First-timer Solvinic provides more questions than answers in a messy, compelling tale.Pub Date: May 14, 2024
ISBN: 9780593639726
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.
Hill, son of the master, turns in a near-perfect homage to Stephen King.
Arthur Oakes has problems. One is that his mom, a social justice warrior, has landed in the slammer for unintentional manslaughter. And he’s one of just three Black kids at an expensive college (in Maine, of course), an easy target. A local townie drug dealer extorts him into stealing rare books from the school’s library, including one bound in human skin. The unwilling donor of said skin turns up, and so do various sinister people, one reminiscent of Tolkien’s Gollum, another a hick who lives—well, sort of—to kill. Then there’s Colin Wren, whose grandfather collects things occult. As will happen, an excursion into that arcana conjures up the title character, a very evil dragon, who strikes an agreement with fine print requiring Arthur and his circle to provide him with a sacrifice every Easter. “It’s a bad idea to make a deal with them,” says Arthur, belatedly. “Language is one of their weapons…as much as the fire they breathe or the tail that can knock down a house.” King Sorrow roasts his first victims, and the years roll by, with Arthur becoming a medieval scholar (fittingly enough, with a critical scene set at King Arthur’s fortress at Tintagel), Colin a tech billionaire with Muskian undertones (“King Sorrow was a dragon, but Colin was some sort of dark sorcerer”), and others of their circle suffering from either messing with dragons or living in an America of despair. There’s never a dull moment, and though Hill’s yarn is very long, it’s full of twists and turns and, beg pardon, Easter eggs pointing to Kingly takes on politics, literature, and internet trolls (a meta MAGA remark comes from an online review of Arthur’s book on dragons: “i was up for a good book about finding magical sords and stabbing dragons and rescuing hot babes in chainmail panties but instead i got a lot of WOKE nonsense.…and UGH it just goes on and on, couldve been hundreds of pages shorter”).
At turns spooky and funny, with bits of inside baseball and a swimming pool’s worth of blood.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780062200600
Page Count: 896
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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