Hammering cyberpunk action, with an occasional detour for a stirring speech against religious fundamentalism.
In Philip K. Dick Award–winner Morgan’s latest (Broken Angels, 2004, etc.), Takeshi Kovacs heads home to a pack of bad memories and a battle with himself.
That’s no metaphor. In this far-future world, people who can afford it (or have employers who can afford it) download their personalities into new bodies, or “sleeves.” The only catch is, sometimes they run into copies of themselves. Kovacs used to be an Envoy, member of the merciless, nearly superhuman corps employed by a no-nonsense UN to hold in check a far-flung galaxy of settled planets. Now he’s just trying to make a living, which usually involves a lot of people ending up dead. (What morality Kovacs had as a kid that wasn’t scrubbed out by gang life on the rough-and-tumble streets of Harlan’s World was effectively erased by Envoy training.) Back home, Kovacs must battle against the planet’s repressive, pseudo-Muslim religion; long ago, its fundamentalist misogyny led to the death of his one true love. Before long, he’s tangled with the local ruling class, the First Families. Then he meets Sylvie, who may be the reincarnation of a messianic figure from centuries past. She too is targeted by the First Families, who don’t want the power structure upended again, and the guy they send to dispatch Sylvie may be a copy of Kovacs himself—only younger and not quite as bright.
Hammering cyberpunk action, with an occasional detour for a stirring speech against religious fundamentalism.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-345-47971-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.
The author returns to the Arkansas setting of They Tell Me of a Home (2005).
It’s 1941, and Gustavus and Emma Jean Peace have just had their seventh child. Gus had hoped to be through having babies. Emma Jean—disappointed with six boys—is determined to try one last time for a girl. When God doesn’t give her a daughter, she decides to make one herself. Naming the new baby “Perfect” and blackmailing the midwife to aid her in her desperate deception, Emma Jean announces the birth of a girl. For eight years, Emma Jean outfits her youngest child in pretty dresses, gives her all the indulgences she longed for in her own blighted girlhood and hides the truth from everyone—even herself. But when the truth comes out, Emma Jean is a pariah and her most-treasured child becomes a freak. It’s hard to know quite what to make of this impassioned, imperfect novel. While another writer might have chosen to complement the sensationalism of his scenario with a tempered style, Black narrates his tale in the key of melodrama. He devotes a considerable number of pages to Emma Jean’s experience as the unloved, darker (and therefore ugly) daughter, but since no amount of back story can justify Emma-Jean’s actions, these passages become redundant. And, most crucially, Black builds toward the point when Perfect discovers that she’s a boy, but seems confused about what to do with his character after this astonishing revelation. At the same time, the author offers a nuanced portrait of an insular community’s capacity to absorb difference, and it’s a cold reader who will be unmoved by his depictions.
Original and earnest, informed both by human limitation and human potential.Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-58267-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.
A bike shop owner and her book club pals keep solving mysteries in ways that somehow don’t endear them to the police (Murder on Cape Cod, 2018, etc.).
Mackenzie Almeida, the proprietor of Mac’s Bikes in the touristy Cape Cod town of Westham, is dating Tim Brunelle, the caring and handsome owner of an artisanal bakery, who wants to get married and start a family. That’s not something independent neat freak Mac is ready to do. She enjoys living in her tiny house with Belle, her talkative parrot, for company. When Mac and her best friend, Gin, come across the dead body of wealthy Beverly Ruchart outside Gin’s taffy shop, Mac’s romantic problems get put on the back burner, especially since Gin is a suspect. She and her date, Eli Tubin, the widower of Beverly’s daughter, had attended a party at Beverly’s home only the night before. Beverly seems to have died from a heart attack, but an autopsy finds that she was poisoned with antifreeze, some of which has been planted in Gin’s garage. Of course Mac and her cohorts at the book club can’t resist a little sleuthing. They uncover several other plausible suspects: Beverly’s ne’er-do-well grandson, Ron, his Russian girlfriend, and his long-absent father, who has a police record. Although Beverly could be generous, she had a sharp tongue that made her plenty of enemies. Her interest in genealogy and reuniting long-lost parents and children endeared her to Wesley Farnham, for whom she found a son, but not so much to Farnham’s daughter, who misses being an only child. Although Mac turns her findings over to the police, she still attracts the killer’s notice and ends up owing her life to Belle.
The romantic doings of the likable characters are more interesting than the mediocre mystery.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4967-1508-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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