A readable and effective combination of international thriller and religious novel.
A mysterious figure may be the savior a world on the brink of chaos needs.
“Is this the end of the world?” asks a young schoolboy at the beginning of this novel by Crofts and debut author Van Es. The reason for the question is alarmingly obvious: The midday sun has been completely eclipsed and the world has suddenly gone dark. In the resulting global panic, the boy’s question is echoed by everybody from the president of Russia to the United States director of national intelligence, who angrily floats many possibilities, from invading aliens to attacking Chinese. That initial blackout only lasts for 12 minutes, after which things temporarily seem to go back to normal for everyone except a young schoolteacher named Sophie, who notices a peculiar man emerging from the shrubbery on her school’s grounds. “He almost seemed to glow,” she notes. “His long, black hair and beard positively shone with good health, as did his darkly tanned skin.” Despite the odd circumstances, Sophie feels instinctively that she can trust this stranger, and when she learns he’s homeless, she impulsively invites him to stay in her apartment, despite having no proof that he’s not a “delusional nutter.” Under prodding from Sophie’s students, the stranger reveals that his name is Jesus but consents to being called simply “Joe” instead. And as the rest of the world deals with the steadily spreading uncertainty of the blackout’s meaning, a more intensely personal drama unfolds in Joe’s personal orbit.
Van Es and Crofts do a very canny job of balancing these two focuses, sensitively playing off the tensions between the forces on a Tom Clancy–style worldwide stage and the much tighter community found in typical contemporary Christian fiction. Readers are brought into the debates raging in the halls of power in many countries, and they’re introduced to a large cast of characters, ranging from artificial intelligence specialist Yung Zhang to Hakizimana, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, and Tanzeel, “a neuroscientist, spiritual leader and author.” As word of Joe spreads, it ignites a global frenzy. “It is tapping into the religious and spiritual ecstasy that we all crave,” readers are told, “whether we choose to admit it or not.” And at the center of everything is Joe himself, easily the book’s most realized character, a kind and unassuming version of Jesus who varies from the canonical version (at one point, he casually reveals that the whole born-in-a-manger drama never happened) as often as he explicitly echoes it. The version of Jesus’ philosophy conveyed by this appealing character is gentle and empathetic. “I wanted a world in which the goodness of people would rise to the surface rather than the selfishness and hardness that was so common,” he tells Sophie at one point. The book’s depiction of this new ministry’s fate is not only closely connected to the tale’s more dramatic events, but also more intriguingly—and ultimately no less globally—to theology, as Joe eventually deals with the world’s religious leaders. The authors occasionally allow their characters to lapse into one-dimensionality, but the story’s general momentum carries the day.
A readable and effective combination of international thriller and religious novel.Pub Date: June 4, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 329
Publisher: RedDoor Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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