A heartfelt conclusion to an intriguing climate-change trilogy.
The final volume in a trilogy of adventure stories set in a near-future Antarctica.
The first of Westhoff's Erebus Tales, Stone Fever (2020), introduced Keltyn SparrowHawk, a Canadian geologist in the climate change–ravaged 24th century whose mission to a snow-free Antarctica in search of precious iridium takes an unexpected turn when her plane crashes and she’s taken in by the migratory Onwei people. The story continued in The Color of Greed (2021) in which scheming industrialist Sir Oscar Bailey mounts another mission to exploit the Onwei for the iridium in their lands. As this third volume opens, SparrowHawk is in jail, and Bailey is set to send another mission to Antarctica’s forbidding Mount Erebus; his goal is to use the iridium buried there to build transport ships for Canadian colonists, much to the dismay of SparrowHawk, who, once free, again seeks to thwart the oligarch’s plans. She’s joined in this quest by her Onwei friends Luz Hogarth and Joaquin Beltran, and, although she doesn’t immediately know it, by anthropologist Fay Del Campo, who’s long been opposed to Bailey’s plans. These and other characters converge in a cross-cultural annual event called the Rendezvous, where their final fates will be determined, for good or ill. Early on in this installment, Westhoff makes skillful use of an initial scene in which SparrowHawk is interviewed about her story (“Please fill us in on the past year and a half of your life”), which will effectively bring new readers up to speed on the events of past novels. Although this final entry feels overlong, its brisk pace seldom slackens. The author’s talent for shaping his characters was evident in the first two volumes, and it remains strong here; the stories of Luz and Fay are particularly involving. Throughout the novel, the tension builds on its way to a gripping climax.
A heartfelt conclusion to an intriguing climate-change trilogy.Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77180-553-7
Page Count: 494
Publisher: Iguana Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
