A smart, engrossing tale that entertainingly uses science.
A genetic algorithm intended as a cure for cancer becomes part of someone’s nefarious and deadly experiments in this techno-thriller.
After losing both parents to cancer, oncologist Dr. Juan Gutierrez devoted his life to finding a cure. While researching generations of species at the pharmaceutical company AgriMed, Juan uncovers an evolutionary pattern. From this, he derives an algorithm that he hopes will combat cancer. Meanwhile, FBI Special Agent Nate Carrington is investigating cases of lethal attacks by animals, such as dogs and birds. These cases are linked by the animals’ DNA evidence, which suggests some form of genetic manipulation. Nate soon determines that someone has pilfered Juan’s algorithm for experiments that ultimately include human subjects. To make matters worse, the stolen algorithm is an older, less stable version and leads to a number of people becoming infected with a life-threatening virus. One of the stricken may be Juan’s new romantic interest, Kathy O’Reilly, who happens to be a survivor of an animal attack. She and her Nevada rancher parents, Frank and Megan, are unwitting participants in an experiment that puts many in danger. Nate and Juan have little time to find the culprit and a cure before the death count among humans starts rising exponentially. Rothman’s (Perimeter, 2018, etc.) tale moves at a steady clip. Dialogue, in particular, is concise; in one scene, Juan converses with his boss over the phone and police officers in person, and the concurrent exchanges are clear and coherent. Scientific terminology is likewise comprehensible, thanks to the author supplying context or Juan simply explaining terms to an individual. While characters are dynamic, especially the O’Reillys, the most memorable is Jasper, a stray dog Frank and Megan take in. Readers know from the beginning that the hyper-intelligent canine is a lab escapee. But despite Jasper’s tie to the experiments, Rothman zeros in on his empathy and fierce loyalty, traits that make his human counterparts even more likable. In useful addenda, the author elucidates on two subjects from the narrative, genetically modified organisms and gene therapy.
A smart, engrossing tale that entertainingly uses science.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79027-123-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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