With its deeper, more sophisticated narrative, classifying Burton’s brilliantly imaginative effort as a Da Vinci Code...
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
BOOK REVIEW
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
These letters from some important executive Down Below, to one of the junior devils here on earth, whose job is to corrupt mortals, are witty and written in a breezy style seldom found in religious literature. The author quotes Luther, who said: "The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn." This the author does most successfully, for by presenting some of our modern and not-so-modern beliefs as emanating from the devil's headquarters, he succeeds in making his reader feel like an ass for ever having believed in such ideas. This kind of presentation gives the author a tremendous advantage over the reader, however, for the more timid reader may feel a sense of guilt after putting down this book. It is a clever book, and for the clever reader, rather than the too-earnest soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1942
ISBN: 0060652934
Page Count: 53
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1943
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