A brisk, remarkable alternate history tale focusing on an indelibly grim world.
In this SF novel, an internal affairs agent fights to protect a woman from a powerful global authority in an alternative mid-20th-century world.
Earth’s leaders formed the Coalition in 1944 in response to devastating Wars. The group unites everyone in the world under one language and monitors individuals with neck-implanted chips. Henry Stasik, as a specialist-inspector for the Coalition’s Internal Affairs, is something of a pariah. So he’s surprised when fashion model Nata Danicheva asks to speak with him and only him at a precinct in a Ukrainian province. She’s got a bombshell—the Coalition, she claims, has been trying to kill her. There’s a slew of charges against her, as she’s a supposed nationalist (read: terrorist). But Stasik looks into the allegations she’s made; he and Diane Mallison, his IA partner, track down Nata’s private accounts, where she’s stockpiled evidence against the Coalition. Meanwhile, someone sends mysterious Coalition operative Erik Bahr to snatch the evidence and, for good measure, kill the two IA agents. As Stasik and Mallison’s investigation takes them around Europe, they evade an assassin and soon realize what Nata has could change the world they think they know. Along with SF elements and an alternate history, Bruno and Wolanyk’s novel boasts a superb noirish tone. Stasik, for example, is a world-weary inspector in a perpetual opiate or benzo fog, with not-exactly-trustworthy Nata as the quintessential femme fatale. This fosters a swift narrative pace, as the agents try to stay ahead of the Coalition and dodge gunfire (mostly Bahr’s). The authors build a dark but intriguing world; the Coalition’s quest for global peace comes with such totalitarian acts as using a “memory-eating serum” on civilians. While Nata’s evidence proves shocking, lingering questions in the story’s latter half go largely unanswered until the end in a startling, if somewhat predictable, turn.
A brisk, remarkable alternate history tale focusing on an indelibly grim world.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Aethon Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.
Travel writer Lo Blacklock is back. Ten years after the events of The Woman in Cabin 10 (2016), she's attending the opening of a lavish Swiss hotel when, once again, a mystery intervenes.
A decade after she almost died on a luxury cruise and ended up exposing a murder plot, travel journalist Laura “Lo” Blacklock is trying to get back into the business post-Covid-19 and post–maternity leave. When she's invited to an exclusive hotel launch by the Leidmann Group on the shores of Switzerland’s gorgeous Lake Geneva, her supportive husband, Judah, insists that she should go, and her old boss, Rowan, says that if Lo can score an interview with the reclusive Marcus Leidmann, she’ll publish it in the Financial Times. Leaving Judah and the kids at home in New York, Lo is surprised by a last-minute upgrade to first class, which kicks off her trip in style. The hotel is appropriately awe-inspiring in both scenic location and effortless luxury, and Lo starts to put the memories of last trip’s trauma behind her, thinking that maybe she can just enjoy the experience this time. But then, at dinner, she's surprised to see at least three guests who were also on that original cruise, and when she finds a mysterious note in her room saying "Please come to suite 11 as soon as possible," she gets another shock. To quote William Faulkner, she realizes that “the past is never dead,” and soon Lo is careening across Europe on her way to England, only to find herself embroiled in another murder. The back half of the novel offers her the opportunity to continue her amateur sleuthing, and while she avoids much of the physical danger that plagued her on the cruise a decade ago, she is in very real legal trouble. This is the prolific Ware’s first sequel, and it's fun to spend time with Lo again, as she's both savvy and kindhearted. Unfortunately, the mystery is not as atmospheric and gripping as usual for Ware, though even a lesser Ruth Ware thriller is still worth reading.
An enjoyable visit with an old character, but not one of Ware’s strongest.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9781668025628
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2025
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