Not exactly revolutionary in the hardware/software of cyberpunk sci-fi but fun and fast enough to keep fans’ mental...
On a giant space-station colony, an outlaw hacker must use all his enhanced biology and cybersleuthing to survive when a deal goes awry and makes him the target of a lethal conspiracy.
Just like ska music, cyberpunk is a lively genre that refuses to die despite even critics in the sci-fi field declaring it has passed its expiration date (or operating system reset point). In this novel, Harritt (Fate’s Hammer, 2017, etc.) brings the kewl slang, outrageous violence, kinky sex, wild body modifications, and smug hacker smarts to a far-future environment: “New Eden,” a 26-kilometer-long space station/colony somewhere among the outer planets of the solar system. Originally built for religious exiles leaving an increasingly unfriendly Earth, New Eden has since evolved into its own roiling, decadent, wide-open culture of 4 million misfit residents, dominated by corporations and “Guilds” rather than a central government. That fact seems to be at the heart of a shadowy conspiracy that engulfs Gregor Skotta, aka Robards, aka Níðhöggr, a “jacker,” or hacker for hire, a brainy tough guy from impoverished origins. He sells digital secrets, combining tech savvy with genetically modified, enhanced muscles and martial arts moves. But a seemingly routine handover of merchandise to his connection turns into a bloodbath that leaves both attackers and some important Guild executives dead. Held accountable, Skotta deploys all his wits and devices in the chase of his life through the bowels, firewalls, and airlocks of New Eden. Harritt hits the ground running with the action and dismemberment and will keep readers’ interest even as he clicks off the familiar genre touchstones, from the involvement of a by-now-obligatory Japanese yakuza dynasty (space-age samurai/ronin stuff; all otaku know the drill) to mortal combat against “battle synths” that are pretty much remote-controlled Terminator robots. Characters loom larger than life, and there’s evident effort to make the narrator/hero (who has a lost love out there in cyberlimbo but sleeps with just about any woman anyway) a really dangerous sort—callously killing one nameless marginal character for following him. He nonetheless maintains a street-gang Bushido ethic, or at least remains a better person than the vague but fiendish master villains bent on transforming New Eden into hell. True, the IT talk sometimes weighs heavy enough that readers will be tempted to call tech support (“Every night they erased the specific lines of code that opened the current back door, and every night the TIK kept replicating and evolving, changing its code slightly so they couldn’t purge it completely from their servers, burying itself further into the OS kernel”). But a good amount of nifty twists and hair-raising fights carry the story over the minor buggy patches.
Not exactly revolutionary in the hardware/software of cyberpunk sci-fi but fun and fast enough to keep fans’ mental joysticks busy.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...
Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.
Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.
Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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