A proficient story that addresses the human-robot quandary in an entertaining fashion.
A salesman at a robot-production corporation who knows too much may lose considerably more than his job in this sci-fi outing.
Taylor Morris is the most successful sales executive at RobotWorld, a manufacturer of industrial and personal robots. The company is prospering in the late 21st century, years after World War III devastated much of the world. While the former U.S. is primarily a wasteland, the survivors live and work in what’s called the Northeast Sector. By all appearances, Taylor is content: His pay is substantial, and the socially awkward man has a companion in Jennifer, a live-in, lifelike RW robot. But Taylor doesn’t shy away from voicing his strong opinions, such as his belief that Arthur Toback, the Northeast Sector’s supreme leader, is a fraud. When he expresses a dread that RW’s bots will adversely affect human employment and relationships, his supervisor, Sophia Ross, is irate and ultimately fires him. Being out of a job makes Taylor’s addiction to the drug Serenity an even larger burden, but his problems subsequently escalate. As there’s a good chance Taylor has seen something he wasn’t supposed to, Sophia decides that it would be easier if someone were to terminate him—permanently. Verola’s (Torpedo, 2012, etc.) solid thriller is set in a believable futuristic world. Technology, for one, is plausible, like personal transport vehicles’ autopilot feature, which is merely an option. The genre’s traditional fear of machines taking over is prevalent, but both humans and robots in this tale offer surprises. Some people aiding Sophia, for example, are doing so reluctantly, and not all of Taylor’s allies are trustworthy. Incidentally, Taylor has a “higher power of intuition,” a rare ability that has little impact within the narrative. A voice he dubs George provides clear-cut advice and insight only sporadically, and it doesn’t always put Taylor at ease. But supporting characters stand out, particularly the women: Sophia and Taylor’s executive assistant and friend, Roz Troward.
A proficient story that addresses the human-robot quandary in an entertaining fashion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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