An often entertaining and energetic dystopian yarn with plenty of intricate action.
In Britz-Cunningham’s SF novel, implant technology lets people surf the web with their minds but also forms the basis of a plot that could kill millions.
In the near future, an all-encompassing Interface wirelessly connects everyone to the internet with brain implants. It lets people visit websites by thinking about them; conduct conversations with thoughts; record video of everything they see; and form a collective “Meta-Mind” to vote on referenda or serve as jurors in criminal cases. The downside is that the government wants to use the Interface to set up a totalitarian “thought readjustment” program and has made not getting an implant a capital offense; the law is enforced by the all-powerful Federal Anti-Terrorist Authority. Battling these injustices is Taiki Graf, the cyberneurologist who invented the Interface but now opposes it as an affront to individual freedom. He’s found a way to get the implants to cause infections that make people slaughter everyone they come across; he hopes this will quickly convince people to remove them. He squares off against his half brother, Egon Graf, FATA’s ruthless director; caught between them is Yara Avril, a New York City police captain who’s the ex-lover of both brothers. Assisted by journalist Jericho Jones, Yara tries to track down Taiki before he can let loose the brain plague. Britz-Cunningham’s vision of a tyrannical hive mind is detailed but not very captivating; the Interface merely seems like an update of present-day internet and smartphone tech. Fortunately, the novel features nifty terrorist plotting and police procedural elements and characters that are sharply drawn and magnetic, if sometimes a bit hammy (“I can have you flayed alive and have molten lead poured into your bowels,” fulminates Egon). The prose is also punchy and colorful throughout: “With a quick machinelike motion, the Moose yanked the Bowie knife from the parrot man’s hand and buried it in his eye. The parrot man waved his left hand, feebly, as if batting off a fly, then fell to the ground in silence.” The result is an engrossing page-turner.
An often entertaining and energetic dystopian yarn with plenty of intricate action.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 9781684428816
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Keylight Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2022
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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