A bracing revenge tale with a strong cast.
A novel revolves around a genius computer geek who desires vengeance for the death of his best friend—a man essentially killed by relentless, greedy lawyers battling to possess his revolutionary work in data mining and analysis.
Gregory Portnoy and Joseph Leege, who have been best friends since childhood, attend MIT in the late 1980s. There, they work together on a highly profitable video game, one of the first split-screen games ever to be played over a modem. With a small group of computer mastermind friends, they start doing work for businesses focusing on internet security and efficiency as well as trading stocks on the internet. But as the best friends rise to the strata of up-and-coming internet innovators, the two have a fundamental difference of opinion. The idealistic and highly sensitive Leege thinks software should be free for all of the world to use, while Portnoy believes owning and selling it to approved companies is the path to take. The two eventually go their separate ways—Portnoy struggling to come to grips with losing the love of his life, a young woman named Chana. When Portnoy discovers that Leege is dead—largely because of incessant legal bullying from a group of attorneys—he sets out to avenge his friend. But Portnoy is not alone: He has someone—or something—helping him who is close to omnipotent. Trial lawyer Buschel’s second novel (after 2016’s By Silent Majority) is a page-turning blend of SF, legal thriller, and financial crime drama. (Think John Grisham meets Isaac Asimov and Bernie Madoff in a bar for drinks.) There’s a lot to love here—the seamless fusion of SF and science facts is compelling, as are the well-developed characters, all of whom possess their own insecurities and flaws. Portnoy’s tumultuous relationship with Chana is an impressively rich subplot. The one minor criticism concerns the bulk of legalese (bankruptcy law, etc.)—while relatively interesting, some of it isn’t critical to the storyline and slows down the momentum.
A bracing revenge tale with a strong cast.Pub Date: March 3, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68433-892-4
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.
What should be a rare horror—a woman gone missing—becomes a pattern in Kubica's latest thriller.
One night, a young mother goes for a run. She never comes home. A few weeks later, the body of Meredith, another missing woman, is found with a self-inflicted knife wound; the only clue about the fate of her still-missing 6-year-old daughter, Delilah, is a note that reads, "You’ll never find her. Don’t even try." Eleven years later, a girl escapes from a basement where she’s been held captive and severely abused; she reports that she is Delilah. Kubica alternates between chapters in the present narrated by Delilah’s younger brother, Leo, now 15 and resentful of the hold Delilah’s disappearance and Meredith’s death have had on his father, and chapters from 11 years earlier, narrated by Meredith and her neighbor Kate. Meredith begins receiving texts that threaten to expose her and tear her life apart; she struggles to keep them, and her anxiety, from her family as she goes through the motions of teaching yoga and working as a doula. One client in particular worries her; Meredith fears her husband might be abusing her, and she's also unhappy with the way the woman’s obstetrician treats her. So this novel is both a mystery about what led to Meredith’s death and Delilah’s imprisonment and the story of what Delilah's return might mean to her family and all their well-meaning neighbors. Someone is not who they seem; someone has been keeping secrets for 11 long years. The chapters complement one another like a patchwork quilt, slowly revealing the rotten heart of a murderer amid a number of misdirections. The main problem: As it becomes clear whodunit, there’s no true groundwork laid for us to believe that this person would behave at all the way they do.
More like a con than a truly satisfying psychological mystery.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-778-38944-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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