A compelling dystopian detective story with a unique setting that keeps its secrets close to the vest.
In Miller’s SF novel, an investigator faces personal demons when his work takes him into dystopian subterranean slums.
In the future, the Hawaiian Islands contain the last bastion of humanity after some undefined global catastrophe. Under the direction of elitist technocrat “Designers” (who are venerated by some to the point of religious worship), the archipelago has been transformed into individual, multitiered city-states reliant on high technology, recycling, and imported resources to function. An uneasy detente exists between the island cities (political strife caused the destruction of the city of Honolulu). Designed Psychological Manifestation entities—implanted, sentient AI assistants reflecting the user’s original personality—are largely outlawed, but investigator Kilohana “Kilo” Ressler still has one, a pseudo-twin named EO. (“He resided between worlds, able to interact with me and the environment around him while remaining invisible and imperceptible to everyone else.”) Kilo (and, unavoidably, EO) has no choice but to embark on a mission dictated by the Designers. Expeditions to the poison-tainted “Continent” to mine vital island necessities are yielding higher death rates than the sanctioned quotas allow—someone is up to something. To solve the mystery, Kilo must reluctantly descend into “the Below”—roiling, semi-lawless underground realms of the poor, the criminal, and the exploited—and confront his own origin. The logline of Miller’s SF debut suggests Blade Runner colliding with Hawaii Five-0; the author has acknowledged Philip K. Dick as an influence on this futuristic detective thriller, which is hardboiled to the point of near-nihilism and flavored with the odors of machine oil and lab-grown meat. In the tradition of Dick’s work, the novel is rife with fiendish conspiracies, deceits, disloyalties, injustices, and impostures that never quite get sorted out. The backdrop of Pacific and Polynesian cultures never feels like a gimmick (there’s no gratuitous surfing). Parsing the dense text is not always easy—readers may go through several chapters before realizing that EO is not corporeal.
A compelling dystopian detective story with a unique setting that keeps its secrets close to the vest.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2026
ISBN: 9798891386013
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2025
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
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.
When a freak dust storm brings a manned mission to Mars to an unexpected close, an astronaut who is left behind fights to stay alive. This is the first novel from software engineer Weir.
One minute, astronaut Mark Watney was with his crew, struggling to make it out of a deadly Martian dust storm and back to the ship, currently in orbit over Mars. The next minute, he was gone, blown away, with an antenna sticking out of his side. The crew knew he'd lost pressure in his suit, and they'd seen his biosigns go flat. In grave danger themselves, they made an agonizing but logical decision: Figuring Mark was dead, they took off and headed back to Earth. As it happens, though, due to a bizarre chain of events, Mark is very much alive. He wakes up some time later to find himself stranded on Mars with a limited supply of food and no way to communicate with Earth or his fellow astronauts. Luckily, Mark is a botanist as well as an astronaut. So, armed with a few potatoes, he becomes Mars' first ever farmer. From there, Mark must overcome a series of increasingly tricky mental, physical and technical challenges just to stay alive, until finally, he realizes there is just a glimmer of hope that he may actually be rescued. Weir displays a virtuosic ability to write about highly technical situations without leaving readers far behind. The result is a story that is as plausible as it is compelling. The author imbues Mark with a sharp sense of humor, which cuts the tension, sometimes a little too much—some readers may be laughing when they should be on the edges of their seats. As for Mark’s verbal style, the modern dialogue at times undermines the futuristic setting. In fact, people in the book seem not only to talk the way we do now, they also use the same technology (cellphones, computers with keyboards). This makes the story feel like it's set in an alternate present, where the only difference is that humans are sending manned flights to Mars. Still, the author’s ingenuity in finding new scrapes to put Mark in, not to mention the ingenuity in finding ways out of said scrapes, is impressive.
Sharp, funny and thrilling, with just the right amount of geekery.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3902-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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