Readers looking to bone up on the subject of Frankenfish with some homicide and espionage as the hushpuppies should find a...
A Chinese plot to steal an American company’s proprietary knowledge to make genetically modified fish spawns passion, spying, and murder among those caught in its currents.
In this novel, the scarred Chinese Gen. Zhou Xiaoping is revered by many in his home country, with his status placing him largely above most laws. But his desire to pursue Western-developed technologies has been hindered by skeptical bureaucrats. Intent on claiming Omniprotein, Inc.’s cutting-edge “Frankenfish” research, which boasts faster growing, heartier specimens and superior water filtration abilities, the general reaches out to an organization called The Long Beach group. This outfit enlists a sociopathic scientist and thief to relieve the U.S. company of its secrets and eliminate any witnesses. In the madman’s cross hairs are numerous Omniprotein employees as well as students at Nebraska State University (which has connections to the firm’s fish farm), all of them navigating attempts on their lives and fraught sexual liaisons. Meanwhile, John Liu, an Omniprotein founder, works tirelessly to help keep the theft and violence from harming the company abroad so that he can travel to China, where his long-estranged ex-wife lives. Powers (OrcaSpeak, 2013) meticulously details the academic and corporate culture, along with the impact biotechnology has on world hunger and environmental issues. But the characters often get enmeshed in the book’s tendency to emphasize teaching over storytelling, saddling the players with a lot of exposition and a very clinical manner of speaking. Eleanor Locke, the president of Omniprotein, splits her time between dealing with her company under siege and repairing her marriage after her husband’s recent surgery. But she spends far more energy cerebrally dissecting the loss of privacy in the age of social media. Gabriel Jordan, a teacher’s aide, and Selena Joyce Campbell, a biologist still recovering from being sexually assaulted, interact awkwardly even by the “charming but bungling STEM student” stereotype. In one of the tale’s clumsier exchanges, Gabriel, his mother, and Selena talk about AIDS testing. Despite interpersonal fumbling, spy games built around real-world emerging technologies still manage to sustain a protracted story’s intrigue.
Readers looking to bone up on the subject of Frankenfish with some homicide and espionage as the hushpuppies should find a lot to feast on here.Pub Date: May 16, 2017
ISBN: 9781539033530
Page Count: 770
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be...
Box takes another break from his highly successful Joe Pickett series (Stone Cold, 2014, etc.) for a stand-alone about a police detective, a developmentally delayed boy, and a package everyone in North Dakota wants to grab.
Cassandra Dewell can’t leave Montana’s Lewis and Clark County fast enough for her new job as chief investigator for Jon Kirkbride, sheriff of Bakken County. She leaves behind no memories worth keeping: her husband is dead, her boss has made no bones about disliking her, and she’s looking forward to new responsibilities and the higher salary underwritten by North Dakota’s sudden oil boom. But Bakken County has its own issues. For one thing, it’s cold—a whole lot colder than the coldest weather Cassie’s ever imagined. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. The biggest problem, though, is one she doesn’t know about until it slaps her in the face. A fatal car accident that was anything but accidental has jarred loose a stash of methamphetamines and cash that’s become the center of a battle between the Sons of Freedom, Bakken County’s traditional drug sellers, and MS-13, the Salvadorian upstarts who are muscling in on their territory. It’s a setup that leaves scant room for law enforcement officers or for Kyle Westergaard, the 12-year-old paperboy damaged since birth by fetal alcohol syndrome, who’s walked away from the wreck with a prize all too many people would kill for.
A suspenseful, professional-grade north country procedural whose heroine, a deft mix of compassion and attitude, would be welcome to return and tie up the gaping loose end Box leaves. The unrelenting cold makes this the perfect beach read.Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-58321-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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