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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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
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