Action-packed and suspenseful, with characters to root for—even if the story doesn’t always hold together.
A man framed for murder must uncover powerful secrets to clear his name in Young’s SF thriller.
The Manifold is an incredibly powerful spaceborne energy generator that has eliminated the need for carbon-based energy. However, it’s also extremely dangerous. Wallas “Trapp” Trapmore is an Indent, forced to work to collect energy from the Manifold. After he narrowly survives a perilous mission (“working beside the Manifold was a suicide mission”), he decides to finally pursue justice for his mother Jessi’s death—but he doesn’t get a chance to do anything before he’s accused of murder. A person who looks just like Trapp has been photographed killing Phileas Gray, the revolutionary scientist who may be responsible for Jessi’s death; in other words, it’s a perfect frame-up. Trapp attempts a daring escape, and he ultimately finds a most unexpected source of help: Phileas Gray’s granddaughter, Bretta Sykes. Together, they work to uncover the complex truth about the Manifold and their families’ roles in it. (Among other things, the Manifold is meant to be a wormhole: Gray and Jessi hoped that it would help humans leave the Earth and populate outer space, the only true solution for the energy crisis.) The novel is a wide-ranging thrill ride. Every time one plot element is resolved, another, more threatening development is revealed to take its place. All of these revelations can be difficult to follow, and it’s sometimes hard to maintain a sense of the actual stakes. The SF elements can also feel clunky; there are so many ideas on offer that not all of them get a chance to be fully explored. Still, the narrative is tense and exciting. Young does an effective job of connecting Trapp’s feelings to whatever action is taking place. The secondary characters, like Trapp’s grandfather, feel compelling and alive, even when they have a short amount of page time. Bretta is a good foil for Trapp, not just a flat love interest; readers will enjoy watching them zoom through this high-stakes gauntlet together.
Action-packed and suspenseful, with characters to root for—even if the story doesn’t always hold together.Pub Date: May 20, 2024
ISBN: 9781964323015
Page Count: 412
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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