In place of human interest, savor all those acronyms: HIRF, FOD-1, EVA, OEM, TLC, PSS, DARPA, PONGS, PRCH, STM, SPIRNet.
The creator of Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta (Chaos, 2016, etc.) peers into space and finds just as much skulduggery there.
Less than nine hours from now, a pair of astronauts, Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer, are scheduled to install a Low Earth Atmospheric Reader in the International Space Station. Only a handful of people with NASA know that LEAR isn’t really LEAR; its status as a quantum machine, America’s opening bid to establish a world-dominating quantum internet, is top secret. One of those people is federal special agent Capt. Calli Chase, “a nerdy scientist whose hobby is to moonlight as a security guard” for NASA Protective Services. That’s a great skill set for her to have, for hours before the installation is set to begin, and shortly after electrical engineer Vera Young, an outside contractor, reports her ID badge stolen, someone or something trips an alarm in the deep-sunk “Yellow Submarine” tunnel linking NASA buildings 1110 and 1111. As a winter storm and a partial government shutdown inch toward the site, Calli and Maj. Fran Lacey, a multiphobic officer of the NASA police, investigate the suspicious site and find no reason the alarm should have gone off. In the meantime, though, there’s potentially more disturbing news: Vera Young seems to have hanged herself after dousing her body in bleach—a possible-crime scene that gives Cornwell a chance to show off her trademark forensics. If Vera didn’t kill herself, who did? Could it have been her sister, Neva Rong, the CEO of Pandora Space Systems? Or Calli’s own twin sister, Carme, a wraithlike, teasingly equivocal figure whose presence Calli keeps sensing even when she’s nowhere to be found? Fans mourning Scarpetta’s absence will console themselves with a death grip on the myriad technical details, an equally strong, even more tormented heroine, and the determined neglect of the remaining characters.
In place of human interest, savor all those acronyms: HIRF, FOD-1, EVA, OEM, TLC, PSS, DARPA, PONGS, PRCH, STM, SPIRNet.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-9406-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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 2026 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.
