GODSENT

Name: GODSENT
Author: Richard Burton
ISBN: 978-1-61145-706-3

by Richard Burton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2012

With its deeper, more sophisticated narrative, classifying Burton’s brilliantly imaginative effort as a Da Vinci Code...

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Moving through recent history into the near future, Burton’s debut novel finds Kate Skylar certain that God is real. Proof grows in her belly.

Kate’s pregnant. No one believes her, but she’s never let a man’s seed touch her body. Kate’s the only child of a wealthy South Carolina Catholic couple. The family’s patriarch, “Papa Jim” Osbourne, owns Oz Corporation, “the largest faith-based prison construction and management company in the nation.” A compelled abortion fails. Discovering the pregnancy, Papa Jim, prominent member of The Way, an anti-Vatican II organization, hides Kate in an Italian convent. She gives birth, but she’s told her son, Ethan, is stillborn. Within the church, two insidious forces battle. Using confessional secrets and computers, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith awaits the Antichrist, in the meantime killing male children born to women claiming sinless conception. The Conversatio, a clandestine ancient group, believes a second virgin birth will bring the divine Son of Man into the world. Ethan grows up in Kansas, adopted son of Conversatio agents. His friends are Peter, whom he converts from being a bully, and Maggie, a girl he loves. Ethan’s revealed as the Son of Man amid riots and worship, with the malevolent Grand Inquisitor, the Congregation’s self-aware computer evolved from J.H. Müller’s 1786 difference engine, seeking to find him. Its parallel processing networks leave “the Congregation’s grasp of computer science and programming far in advance of the rest of the world.” Entwined in politics and commanding a private army known as the “munchies,” Papa Jim has its counterpart, AEGIS (Artificially Engineered Global Intelligence System), and he’s intent upon establishing a Catholic theocracy. While Ethan preaches love and forgiveness, the Congregation plans his assassination and a priest/computer scientist ventures deep within the Vatican’s basement to confront a saint in a “noötic field,” only to hear the Grand Inquisitor ask him to receive its confession.

With its deeper, more sophisticated narrative, classifying Burton’s brilliantly imaginative effort as a Da Vinci Code thriller sells it short.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-61145-706-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Arcade

Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

- BOOK REVIEW
THE RICHARD BURTON DIARIES
by Richard Burton edited by Chris Williams

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WE WERE THE LUCKY ONES

by Georgia Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 14, 2017

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

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Hunter’s debut novel tracks the experiences of her family members during the Holocaust.

Sol and Nechuma Kurc, wealthy, cultured Jews in Radom, Poland, are successful shop owners; they and their grown children live a comfortable lifestyle. But that lifestyle is no protection against the onslaught of the Holocaust, which eventually scatters the members of the Kurc family among several continents. Genek, the oldest son, is exiled with his wife to a Siberian gulag. Halina, youngest of all the children, works to protect her family alongside her resistance-fighter husband. Addy, middle child, a composer and engineer before the war breaks out, leaves Europe on one of the last passenger ships, ending up thousands of miles away. Then, too, there are Mila and Felicia, Jakob and Bella, each with their own share of struggles—pain endured, horrors witnessed. Hunter conducted extensive research after learning that her grandfather (Addy in the book) survived the Holocaust. The research shows: her novel is thorough and precise in its details. It’s less precise in its language, however, which frequently relies on cliché. “You’ll get only one shot at this,” Halina thinks, enacting a plan to save her husband. “Don’t botch it.” Later, Genek, confronting a routine bit of paperwork, must decide whether or not to hide his Jewishness. “That form is a deal breaker,” he tells himself. “It’s life and death.” And: “They are low, it seems, on good fortune. And something tells him they’ll need it.” Worse than these stale phrases, though, are the moments when Hunter’s writing is entirely inadequate for the subject matter at hand. Genek, describing the gulag, calls the nearest town “a total shitscape.” This is a low point for Hunter’s writing; elsewhere in the novel, it’s stronger. Still, the characters remain flat and unknowable, while the novel itself is predictable. At this point, more than half a century’s worth of fiction and film has been inspired by the Holocaust—a weighty and imposing tradition. Hunter, it seems, hasn’t been able to break free from her dependence on it.

Too beholden to sentimentality and cliché, this novel fails to establish a uniquely realized perspective.

Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-399-56308-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016

Categories:

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Hulu’s ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’ Adds To Cast

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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.