A wholly absorbing and grounded dystopian tale.
A man in the late 21st century struggles to stay ahead of a corrupt government and a diabolical corporation in Verola’s SF sequel.
Taylor Morris had good reason to turn against his former employer, RobotWorld. The robot-production company had a plan underway with the government to “phase out humans” and replace them with sentient bots. Following Taylor’s failed attempt to thwart said scheme, officers arrest him along with his family and friends. Luckily, apparent fans of Taylor’s anti-government radio show manage to free him and his wife, Roz. The couple tries to stay hidden, and while Taylor has identified a few higher-ups involved in the RW–government plot, he doesn’t yet know the identity of the Controller. This individual is the RobotWorld founder and a formidable villain. It seems he’s tracking Taylor, who’ll hopefully lead the Controller to the Aussie, an anti-bot advocate whom RW considers just as dangerous as Taylor. Finding someone whom Taylor can trust isn’t easy, particularly since RW has bots in high-ranking government positions. But he isn’t ready to give up and soon realizes the best fight he can bring against RW and the government is a political one. Verola’s solid sequel unfolds in the Northeast Sector, a small part of the debilitated post–WWIII U.S. It’s primarily a character-driven novel, featuring a motley, intriguing cast. For example, both the Controller and the Aussie are delightfully mysterious, and some bots display human traits like vexation and discontent. As in the first installment, tech is more practical than fascinating; blue detainment halos restrain prisoners, for example. Verola makes the storyline timely with sexbots and Big Brother–style tech.
A wholly absorbing and grounded dystopian tale.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5439-3557-8
Page Count: 350
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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
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