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
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.
A processing plant manager struggles with the grim realities of a society where cannibalism is the new normal.
Marcos Tejo is the boss’s son. Once, that meant taking over his father’s meat plant when the older man began to suffer from dementia and require nursing home care. But ever since the Transition, when animals became infected with a virus fatal to humans and had to be destroyed, society has been clamoring for a new source of meat, laboring under the belief, reinforced by media and government messaging, that plant proteins would result in malnutrition and ill effects. Now, as is true across the country, Marcos’ slaughterhouse deals in “special meat”—human beings. Though Marcos understands the moral horror of his job supervising the workers who stun, kill, flay, and butcher other humans, he doesn’t feel much since the crib death of his infant son. “One can get used to almost anything,” he muses, “except for the death of a child.” One day, the head of a breeding center sends Marcos a gift: an adult female FGP, a “First Generation Pure,” born and bred in captivity. As Marcos lives with his product, he gradually begins to awaken to the trauma of his past and the nightmare of his present. This is Bazterrica’s first novel to appear in America, though she is widely published in her native Argentina, and it could have been inelegant, using shock value to get across ideas about the inherent brutality of factory farming and the cruelty of governments and societies willing to sacrifice their citizenry for power and money. It is a testament to Bazterrica’s skill that such a bleak book can also be a page-turner.
An unrelentingly dark and disquieting look at the way societies conform to committing atrocities.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982150-92-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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