An entertaining SF thriller, elegantly written and imaginatively conceived.
Shape-shifting lizards attempt to take over California in Albergo’s colorful SF adventure.
Hiding from dinosaurs and then humans, sentient reptilians—think big serpents with fangs and legs, or maybe giant talking Gila monsters—have hunkered down in a belowground colony near Los Angeles for eons. They’re hoping for a comeback, emboldened by their ability to swallow a live, whole human and change their form into that person’s fully human body, complete with their memories and speech patterns. Deploying this trick is Sesh, a high-ranking serpent who transforms into shipping magnate Sam Smith, and Shila Ghiss, a female serpent scientist who discovers a way to nonlethally transform into anthropologist Susan River by drinking a blood sample. They emerge into LA in 1928 to carry out a plan to surreptitiously dose civic leaders, police, and the public with a drug that makes humans obey serpent commands. Complicating things are engineering professor Horace Jennings and geologist Helen Parker, who have hired private eye Harry Raymond to help them locate Helen’s missing geologist boyfriend, Mateo Martinez. Horace and Helen bump into Shila/Susan at a serpent-controlled speakeasy where the drug is slipped into customers’ drinks; Shila, now influenced by Susan’s consciousness and opposed to Sesh’s plan, protects Horace from an attack by Sesh. Horace and Shila/Susan fall in love, and she helps him and Helen piece together the serpentine scheme and locate Mateo. Unfortunately, a thoroughly dosed Mateo has joined Sesh/Sam in hatching another plot, this one to start an earthquake by summoning giant worms from the Earth’s molten interior to the San Andreas fault. Can Horace, Helen, Harry, and Shila/Susan head off the seismic catastrophe? And will Horace still love Susan when he learns of her reptilian identity?
Albergo’s yarn features an intriguing remix of classic SF tropes, with motifs from Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), Dune (1965), and a dash of H. P. Lovecraft without the dudgeon, all given a fun, atmospheric spin as a lightly noirish LA mystery. (“This is Los Angeles,” grumbles the hardboiled Harry. “There are hucksters, whores, and gangsters here who would just as soon kill you as look at you.”) The author provides an arresting view of human nature through alien eyes, and the riveting action scenes move adroitly from evocative suspense to grisly horror: “Where the tentacles met, a mouth rose; and behind the mouth rose a titanic, muscular, slime-covered worm…. One [tentacle] wrapped about his neck, two about his waist. They flexed, and in an instant, they pulled off his head and ripped his body in half.” Albergo also writes in an entrancing lyrical vein in which otherness brings wonder instead of terror: “Through the human’s remarkable eyes, I can see the sandy floor of a canyon and a rushing river, green plants at its banks,” notes Shila on her first visit to Earth’s surface. “Above us is an endless ocean of blue light…for an instant I feel as if I will fall up, forever.” The result is a page-turner that both frightens and dazzles with its portrayal of cross-species encounters.
An entertaining SF thriller, elegantly written and imaginatively conceived.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798993852706
Page Count: 284
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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