A super-brainy high-concept dystopian tale guaranteed to reward anyone who’s in the mood.
A human clone’s struggle to solve the mystery of her own existence brings her up against a brace of ruthless adversaries.
When she died in 2040, Constance D’Arcy was your typical mixed-race remote nonprofit worker who’d been lucky enough to survive the car crash that put her lover, Zhi Duan, in a coma and killed two other members of Awaken the Ghosts, the band whose guitarist she was. Now, in an ironic slap at her own name, she awakens from the monthly memory download she’d put off for a year and a half and finds herself somehow dead and resurrected as a clone, free of her tattoos, the aches and pains from the accident, and every trace of her memory from the past 18 months. The cloning procedure, pioneered by Palingenesis, the company Con’s aunt, Abigail Stickling, co-founded with angel investor Vernon Gaddis, is ordinarily reserved for the very wealthy, but Abigail had made Con a present of her own clone and arranged for her to have regular downloads of her memory to ease the transition if the clone needed to be activated. So what has Con been doing for those lost 18 months? Why are Gaddis and Dr. Brooke Fenton, his successor as Palingenesis CEO, so intent on accessing the knowledge locked in her brain—knowledge she can’t summon up herself? Most important, is there any limit to the bottomless complications FitzSimmons keeps revealing to make Con’s predicament more and more agonizing whenever she and her readers think they’ve finally gotten the lay of the land?
A super-brainy high-concept dystopian tale guaranteed to reward anyone who’s in the mood.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1426-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.
Two killers are on the loose. Can they be stopped?
In this ambitious mystery, the prolific and popular King tells the story of a serial murderer who pledges, in a note to Buckeye City police, to kill “13 innocents and 1 guilty,” in order, we eventually learn, to avenge the death of a man who was framed and convicted for possession of child pornography and then killed in prison. At the same time, the author weaves in the efforts of another would-be murderer, a member of a violently abortion-opposing church who has been stalking a popular feminist author and women’s rights activist on a publicity tour. To tell these twin tales of murders done and intended, King summons some familiar characters, including private investigator Holly Gibney, whom readers may recall from previous novels. Gibney is enlisted to help Buckeye City police detective Izzy Jaynes try to identify and stop the serial killer, who has been murdering random unlucky citizens with chilling efficiency. She’s also been hired as a bodyguard for author and activist Kate McKay and her young assistant. The author succeeds in grabbing the reader’s interest and holding it throughout this page-turning tale of terror, which reads like a big-screen thriller. The action is well paced, the settings are vividly drawn, and King’s choice to focus on the real and deadly dangers of extremist thought is admirable. But the book is hamstrung by cliched characters, hackneyed dialogue (both spoken and internal), and motives that feel both convoluted and overly simplistic. King shines brightest when he gets to the heart of our darkest fears and desires, but here the dangers seem a bit cerebral. In his warning letter to the police, the serial killer wonders if his cryptic rationale to murder will make sense to others, concluding, “It does to me, and that is enough.” Is it enough? In another writer’s work, it might not be, but in King’s skilled hands, it probably is.
Even when King is not at his best, he’s still good.Pub Date: May 27, 2025
ISBN: 9781668089330
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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