A respectable effort to play with the thriller form that gets bogged down by those very same thriller mechanics.
A new club drug tangles a scenester in a global conspiracy in this quirky tale of love and corporate overreach.
The third novel by Beauman (The Teleportation Accident, 2013, etc.) opens with Raf, a 22-year-old Londoner, at a rave, where he hears about an Ecstasy-like drug called glow. He’s intrigued, and not exclusively for pleasure-seeking reasons: Raf suffers from “non-24-hour sleep/wake syndrome,” a condition that wrecks normal circadian rhythms, and studying glow plays into his interest in the body’s peculiar chemistry. But his investigations uncover something more sinister: Paramilitary types in white vans are kidnapping Burmese men, and Raf soon learns of an effort by a multinational mining company, Lacebark, to control production of glow’s organic source in Myanmar. Guiding him through this underworld is Cherish, a half-Burmese woman whose father was a Lacebark executive. She’s smart and tough-minded, and a romance soon develops, but Raf doesn’t know if he can trust the array of ex–Lacebark employees, Burmese expat revolutionaries and rave promoters who make a relatively benign drug seem like a deadly experience in a hurry. (The bulk of the novel takes place across two weeks.) Beauman writes thoughtfully on how drugs play with the senses, and the novel is spiked with clever observations that connect body chemistry with big-data algorithms and corporate exploitation. In other moments, Raf’s bantering with Cherish and his stumblebum investigations add a dose of comedy. But the overall plot is exceedingly convoluted, with just about every character’s motivations called into question until everybody seems like a double or triple agent. This may play into Beauman’s point about the difficulty of nailing down the nature of the human condition, but the closing pages are burdened by who-did-what-to-whom explication.
A respectable effort to play with the thriller form that gets bogged down by those very same thriller mechanics.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-35260-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
Very slow off the mark, though once blackmail and murder enter the picture, Scottoline moves things along with her customary...
In Scottoline’s latest family-centered thriller (Accused, 2013, etc.), Jake Buckman lets son Ryan drive the family car on a back road. Very bad idea.
The car hits someone, and she’s dead. Faced with the prospect of his teenager’s life being ruined, Jake tells him to get back in the car, and they drive away. “[D]on’t tell Mom,” Jake warns; he loves his wife, but Pam has the personality you’d expect of a superior court judge (judgmental), and their marriage is still recovering from Jake’s decision to start his own business, which has made him a mostly absentee husband and father. He’s now “one of the top-ten ranked financial planners in southeastern Pennsylvania,” though his planning skills aren’t evident as Jake ineptly tries to cover their tracks. He also has a terrible time keeping his son from confessing once they learn that the dead girl is Ryan’s high school classmate Kathleen Lindstrom. It takes more than 100 pages for the plot to involve anything other than Jake’s nerves, Pam’s suspicions and Ryan’s guilty wails, all of which are believable but not very interesting. Sleazy blackmailer Lewis Deaner livens things up, especially after he turns up murdered. If the police find those cellphone pictures Deaner had of Jake and Ryan at the scene of the crime, Jake will be a suspect. And once Ryan has blurted out the truth to his mother, furious Pam might be just as happy to see Jake in jail. The killer’s identity isn’t much of a surprise, since he’s the only character with any individual traits apart from the Buckmans and the cops, but the final twist comes out of nowhere, 10 pages from the end.
Very slow off the mark, though once blackmail and murder enter the picture, Scottoline moves things along with her customary professionalism, if scant credibility.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-01009-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
A thrilling and satisfying sequel to the 1969 classic.
Over 50 years after an extraterrestrial microbe wiped out a small Arizona town, something very strange has appeared in the Amazon jungle in Wilson’s follow-up to Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain.
The microparticle's introduction to Earth in 1967 was the disastrous result of an American weapons research program. Before it could be contained, Andromeda killed all but two people in tiny Piedmont, Arizona; during testing after the disaster, AS-1 evolved and escaped into the atmosphere. Project Eternal Vigilance was quickly set up to scan for any possible new outbreaks of Andromeda. Now, an anomaly with “signature peaks” closely resembling the original Andromeda Strain has been spotted in the heart of the Amazon, and a Wildfire Alert is issued. A diverse team is assembled: Nidhi Vedala, an MIT nanotechnology expert born in a Mumbai slum; Harold Odhiambo, a Kenyan xenogeologist; Peng Wu, a Chinese doctor and taikonaut; Sophie Kline, a paraplegic astronaut and nanorobotics expert based on the International Space Station; and, a last-minute addition, roboticist James Stone, son of Dr. Jeremy Stone from The Andromeda Strain. They must journey into the deepest part of the jungle to study and hopefully contain the dire threat that the anomaly seemingly poses to humanity. But the jungle has its own dangers, and it’s not long before distrust and suspicion grip the team. They’ll need to come together to take on what waits for them inside a mysterious structure that may not be of this world. Setting the story over the course of five days, Wilson (Robopocalypse, 2011, etc.) combines the best elements of hard SF novels and techno-thrillers, using recovered video, audio, and interview transcripts to shape the narrative, with his own robotics expertise adding flavor and heft. Despite a bit of acronym overload, this is an atmospheric and often terrifying roller-coaster ride with (literally) sky-high stakes that pays plenty of homage to The Andromeda Strain while also echoing the spirit and mood of Crichton’s other works, such as Jurassic Park and Congo. Add more than a few twists and exciting set pieces (especially in the finale) to the mix, and you’ve got a winner.
A thrilling and satisfying sequel to the 1969 classic.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-247327-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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