A detailed, if blandly plotted, SF adventure with great tech.
A futuristic bounty hunter goes on a lucrative mission to Mars to find a businesswoman’s husband in Dalzell’s SF novel.
It’s the 26th century, and as this book opens, bounty hunter Owen Bone is looking for a kidnapped teenage girl named Solange who’s being held hostage by a drug dealer. Owen and his robot sidekick, Sandi, manage to rescue the girl; it’s revealed that Owen has formidable skills as a mercenary and that the robot has seemingly limitless strength, and both of these factors prove invaluable during the mission. There’s no time for the pair to rest, though, as businesswoman and scientist Stella Ling recruits them to find her husband, a member of the Chinese Politburo who’s taken off to the colonized planet Mars with a sizable chunk of Stella’s money and other valuables. Owen is happy with the promise of a $10 million payment, but once he’s on the red planet, he faces unexpected obstacles. As he and Sandi become acquainted with the Martian bureaucracy, they realize that the job was actually a ruse, and their true objective is to eliminate a sly and powerful man named Wilson Black. Owen and Sandi find themselves tested as he leads them on an interplanetary chase that pushes them to their limits. Dalzell offers an intriguing vision of Earth in the future that eagerly dives into details regarding the financial and political workings of China, Russia, and other countries. Along the way, it also provides some darker sections that deal with greed, mining, and developing worlds that never really develop. The Mars colony, the spaceships, and the robotics all come with unique inventions and advancements, which only further highlight Dalzell’s impressive worldbuilding. The main plot, however, is a rather simple space-based caper with a bit of cat-and-mouse, and occasional typos in the text distract from the novel’s strengths.
A detailed, if blandly plotted, SF adventure with great tech.Pub Date: April 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73460-550-1
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.
The first installment of Liu’s Julia Z saga is an SF thriller set in a near-future “post-truth age” where the use of AI and the inundation of digital disinformation and data pollution have blurred the lines between delusion and reality.
Julia—whose immigrant mother, a divisive political activist, was murdered during a border protest—has lived on her own since she was 14. A brilliant hacker now 23, she’s been trying to live in online anonymity, acutely aware of the multitude of ways she can be identified and tracked. Living in a Boston suburb and struggling to make ends meet, she inadvertently becomes entangled with a lawyer named Piers Neri and his search for his artist wife, Elli Krantz—famous for her experimental work in vivid dreaming—who may or may not have been kidnapped. A prime suspect in his wife’s disappearance, Piers goes on the run with the help of Julia—and together, they begin putting together pieces of a mind-bogglingly intricate puzzle that links Elli to a powerful criminal with a global reach. As Julia digs deeper into the appeal of vivid dreaming and the criminal’s ruthless endeavors, she discovers the sham that is the American Dream: “America was corrupt and steeped in sin. The powerful had rigged the game for themselves and turned the country into a panopticon to imprison the rest of us. Anytime one of the powerless—it didn’t matter the color of your skin, the language you spoke, the place you were born in—was on the verge of climbing out, they would be ruthlessly tossed back into the pit.” And amid the backdrop of dealing with unresolved childhood trauma and the need to find her place in the world, she finds something unexpected—herself.
Equal parts biting social commentary and page-turning thriller, a disturbing glimpse into humankind’s possible future.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781668083178
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Saga/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
A huge, churning, relentlessly entertaining melodrama buoyed by confidence that human values will prevail.
A rare, rattling space opera—first of a trilogy, or series, from Corey (aka Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).
Humanity colonized the solar system out as far as Neptune but then exploration stagnated. Straight-arrow Jim Holden is XO of an ice-hauler swinging between the rings of Saturn and the mining stations of the Belt, the scattered ring of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. His ship's captain, responding to a distress beacon, orders Holden and a shuttle crew to investigate what proves to be a derelict. Holden realizes it's some sort of trap, but an immensely powerful, stealthed warship destroys the ice-hauler, leaving Holden and the shuttle crew the sole survivors. This unthinkable act swiftly brings Earth, with its huge swarms of ships, Mars with its less numerous but modern and powerful navy, and the essentially defenseless Belt to the brink of war. Meanwhile, on the asteroid Ceres, cynical, hard-drinking detective Miller—we don't find out he has other names until the last few pages—receives orders to track down and "rescue"—i.e. kidnap—a girl, Julie Mao, who rebelled against her rich Earth family and built an independent life for herself in the Belt. Julie is nowhere to be found but, as the fighting escalates, Miller discovers that Julie's father knew beforehand that hostilities would occur. Now obsessed, Miller continues to investigate even when he loses his job—and the trail leads towards Holden, the derelict, and what might prove to be a horrifying biological experiment. No great depth of character here, but the adherence to known physical laws—no spaceships zooming around like airplanes—makes the action all the more visceral. And where Corey really excels is in conveying the horror and stupidity of interplanetary war, the sheer vast emptiness of space and the amorality of huge corporations.
A huge, churning, relentlessly entertaining melodrama buoyed by confidence that human values will prevail.Pub Date: June 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-12908-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Orbit/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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