Telisa and Magnus could carry a series with their entertaining if somewhat predictable smuggling adventures.
An otherworld adventure featuring a military brat turned smuggler.
McCloskey (The House of Yeel, 2012, etc) starts with what is hopefully the beginning of a new series featuring xenoarchaeologist Telisa Relachik. After the government detects the heroes upon their arrival on planet T2 in search of ruins, United Nations Space Force officer Joe Hartlet is dispatched toward this abandoned planet. But before Joe can catch up to Telisa and crew—including the handsome enforcer, Magnus—the smugglers find an odd power source accessible through a tunnel. They throw caution to the wind and, like the robotic alien life form in the prologue, take a tumble down the strange rabbit hole. What lies beneath is a constantly shifting landscape that robotic alien Shiny eventually figures out how to maneuver, only after he’s wiped out half of Telisa’s crew, leaving her alone with Magnus for guidance, protection and entertainment. Joe eventually catches up and, together with Shiny, the gang forms an uneasy alliance. It’s shattered, though, once the alien finds the exit from this mysterious hole in the ground. From there, Shiny, Telisa and Magnus escape in a smuggler’s ship—only to be hijacked by Shiny and taken to what the reader is first told is an outpost planet, but later, when Joe and the UNSF arrive, is what seems to be the original hole in the ground. It’s a confusing transition: Are they back in the mysteriously changing environment or on a new planet? Author McCloskey doesn’t make it clear. He excels, however, in bringing up the Neuromancer-inspired implanted chips that enable communication within Telisa’s society. There’s even the brief mention of the need for people to explore a new form of communication: face to face. At one point, Telisa marvels at how quiet life is without her link; she’s not sure how people survived before it. The social statement rightly falls to the wayside in favor of adventure and the questionable motives behind Shiny’s presence. Many questions remain unanswered, however, due to the book’s abrupt ending.
Telisa and Magnus could carry a series with their entertaining if somewhat predictable smuggling adventures.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466393844
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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