A hard-to-shake techno-paranoid fever dream about the collapse of truth, trust, and sanity in the digital age.
Ruskin’s cerebral conspiracy thriller diagnoses the digital age as terminally ill.
Set largely within Manhattan Central Hospital, this sprawling novel follows psychiatrist Marc Toledano and his former patient, Dr. Leila Elfassi. Now a psychiatrist herself, Leila has taken on leadership of the department just in time to confront a disturbing rise in paranoid patients suffering from what appears to be an entirely new mental disorder. At first, the symptoms resemble familiar psychosis: agitation, delusions, rage, extreme fixations. But as the patients become violent, and unexplained attacks multiply—including the brutal murder of a beloved hospital nurse—the narrative widens into an ambitious web of espionage, surveillance technology, online radicalization, and geopolitical intrigue stretching from New York to Montreal to Paris to Jerusalem. The novel’s strongest passages emerge from realistic depictions of the institutional collapse and emotional exhaustion affecting medical workers; emergency rooms overflow, psychiatric staff burn out, and hospital administrators prioritize digital “efficiency” over human connection. (“The ER is short-staffed. This night, Kofi is the lone psych resident in emergency.”) The atmosphere is persistently anxious, especially in scenes where physicians struggle to distinguish ordinary mental illness from something darker and more systemic. The author clearly possesses deep knowledge of psychiatry and uses it to unsettling effect, particularly in discussions of mob psychology, algorithmic manipulation, and the erosion of social trust. The espionage plot involving sleeper agents, corporate corruption, and covert mind-control research adds momentum and genuine intrigue, even if the revelations occasionally strain plausibility. The narrative sometimes gets sidetracked by the sheer multitude of plot lines and political ideologies—characters deliver lengthy philosophical monologues on politics, trauma, capitalism, and technology, sometimes at the expense of narrative flow. But the novel is undeniably compelling; beneath the tangled plotting and heavy exposition, the work sounds a sincere alarm about the fragility of human connection in an era of technological overstimulation and ideological fracture. The final pages, moving from personal grief to apocalyptic ambiguity, will undoubtedly leave readers with a lingering sense of dread.
A hard-to-shake techno-paranoid fever dream about the collapse of truth, trust, and sanity in the digital age.Pub Date: June 15, 2026
ISBN: 9781915952752
Page Count: -
Publisher: Sul Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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