A sleek, inventive techno-thriller and courtroom drama set in a highly advanced future world.
When a trillionaire is revived from a cryogenic freeze, a veteran prosecutor tries him for tax evasion in Baldwin’s speculative novel.
Adiari de Barcelona is an experienced prosecutor who is seemingly in the prime of her career. In fact, she is 128 years old, but with the help of nanobots and plastic surgery (and possibly other futuristic technology), she looks much younger—and gives people a fake birthdate. Many years earlier, a tech wiz who worked in AI and nanorobotics committed suicide and was cryogenically preserved. This tech genius, Bobby Lightfoot, is the first person ever to be revived from such a state. Now, the IRS argues that his suicide was an attempt at avoiding taxes, and Lightfoot faces the death penalty. Enter judge Jeremy Philstein, who hosts a popular court TV show. Judge Philstein will hear Bobby’s case on his show, broadcasting to an audience hungry for economic justice against the nation’s wealthy. (“Can worshippers of the planet’s most-viewed reality holodrama expect the public execution of history’s wealthiest perp?”) There is just one problem: Adiari was once married to a man named Bobby Lightfoot. But is this the same guy? The law library computer AI (named “JD”) is helping out Adiari, but it is also connected to seemingly every system and wants to control her emotions. In this very high-profile trial, Adiari has to both secure a conviction against Lightfoot and take a stand against an increasingly domineering machine. Baldwin’s SF novel, the third in a series, propels readers into an advanced world of high-tech wonders, adding a legal drama that works to keep everything grounded. The characters are relatable and the dialogue feels true to life, further bolstering the plausibility of a story that is steeped in the fantastic but bounded by such quotidian elements as the IRS. Adiari is an admirable protagonist, the tech advancements on display here are impressive, and the warnings about advancing AI technology are timely and well-crafted.
A sleek, inventive techno-thriller and courtroom drama set in a highly advanced future world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2024
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
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.
A gravely post-apocalyptic tale that blends mystery with the academic novel.
McEwan’s first narrator, Thomas Metcalfe, is one of a vanishing breed, a humanities professor, who on a spring day in 2119, takes a ferry to a mountain hold, the Bodleian Snowdonia Library. The world has been remade by climate change, the subject of a course he teaches, “The Politics and Literature of the Inundation.” Nuclear war has irradiated the planet, while “markets and communities became cellular and self-reliant, as in early medieval times.” Nonetheless, the archipelago that is now Britain has managed to scrape up a little funding for the professor, who is on the trail of a poem, “A Corona for Vivien,” by the eminent poet Francis Blundy. Thanks to the resurrected internet, courtesy of Nigerian scientists, the professor has access to every bit of recorded human knowledge; already overwhelmed by data, scholars “have robbed the past of its privacy.” But McEwan’s great theme is revealed in his book’s title: How do we know what we think we know? Well, says the professor of his quarry, “I know all that they knew—and more, for I know some of their secrets and their futures, and the dates of their deaths.” And yet, and yet: “Corona” has been missing ever since it was read aloud at a small party in 2014, and for reasons that the professor can only guess at, for, as he counsels, “if you want your secrets kept, whisper them into the ear of your dearest, most trusted friend.” And so it is that in Part 2, where Vivien takes over the story as it unfolds a century earlier, a great and utterly unexpected secret is revealed about how the poem came to be and to disappear, lost to history and memory and the coppers.
A philosophically charged tour de force by one of the best living novelists in English.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804728
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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