An inventive and action-packed, if sometimes uneven, SF finale.
This third installment of an SF trilogy focuses on a war between aliens and humans.
Raised as humans, four brothers—Joe, Franc, Paul, and Bart—received the shocking news that they were clones of an alien race and that this species was bent on humanity’s destruction. Called the Dark Ones, they are truly something to be feared. But it seems not all of them are evil. The brothers’ own father helped set up seven safe havens on Earth, though the siblings didn’t believe that all of the refuges would survive. Now, to everyone’s surprise and suspicion, a group appears in Sicily claiming to be from Denmark, one of the havens thought lost in a great battle. Joe is already wary of the band, but then he notices that one of the travelers bears a sign that he is a Dark One. It is Typhon, son of the Dark Ones’ leader and the very alien who was rumored to have destroyed the Denmark refuge. Typhon claims to have seen the error of his ways during the battle and turned against his own people to defend the haven: “It may be hard to believe, but I would fight to the death to protect you and your beliefs.” Joe cannot be sure that Typhon has turned over a new leaf, but bigger clashes are coming, and the entire planet is at stake. Humans will eventually need to prepare for a full-scale invasion. As this volume is the finale of Edge’s trilogy, it is highly recommended that readers peruse the first two novels to fully grasp the intriguing saga. The author does his best to catch readers up in the installment’s beginning, but the infodump will be overwhelming and exhausting for those unfamiliar with the series. This confusion is made worse by the fact that several characters are often talking in the same paragraph in the story. Readers may be baffled as to who is speaking, especially if they are not well acquainted with the large cast. Still, SF fans willing to put in the effort will be rewarded with innovative worldbuilding and an epic, high-stakes battle that delivers plenty of action and thrills. This is a gripping, wide-ranging tale that involves journal excerpts, faith, healing, monks, cloned wolves, uneasy alliances, and various aliens, weapons, and spaceships.
An inventive and action-packed, if sometimes uneven, SF finale.Pub Date: March 28, 2022
ISBN: 979-8421346050
Page Count: 493
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.
When a bunch of corporate assholes mark their planet for destruction, a garage band of colonists must defend their home world with the power of rock.
Slightly sidestepping his frenetic litRPG—literary role-playing game—doorstoppers, here Dinniman takes on capitalism, propaganda, xenophobia, and violence as entertainment. Thankfully for readers, it’s all wrapped in the usual profane, adolescent humor, and SF readers will have a ball. A couple of hundred years after they left Earth, the inhabitants of the interstellar colony of New Sonora weren’t expecting much in the way of new threats, especially after a mysterious illness killed almost everyone between the ages of 30 and 60. That disaster left only the young and the old on the populated planet, where farming is enabled by highly accelerated AI and people are generally cool with each other. But when drummer Oliver Lewis stumbles across a foul-mouthed killer mech piloted by a child, he realizes that something’s definitely fishy. Earth, it seems, has classified the New Sonorans as non-human and scheduled their destruction as a paid, five-day combat game. Apex Industries, led by lead mercenary Eli Opel, has reverse-engineered Ender’s Game and is turning loose its players with real bullets and bombs on the population of New Sonora. The resistance is a weird bunch, led by proto-slacker Oliver; his little sister, Lulu; and his ex-girlfriend, documentary filmmaker and burgeoning revolutionary Rosita Zapatero, as well as the other members of Oliver’s band, the Rhythm Mafia. Thankfully, they also have Roger, the last functioning AI on the planet, though Oliver’s grandfather permanently programmed it to nannybot mode as a dying joke. Call the book overlong—the battle scenes often feel like watching someone play a videogame—but the humor and the execution are cutting without being mean and there’s almost always a point.
A disarmingly heartfelt space adventure that dares to suggest genocide might be a bad business.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9780593820308
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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