An offbeat and unyielding undersea adventure that bubbles with tension.
In Willson’s thriller, set about 30 years in the future, the crew of a highly advanced submarine battles for survival on the ocean floor as the world above teeters on the brink of nuclear annihilation.
The HMS Bancroft’s Capt. Kel Williams knows every inch of the submarine she commands, because she helped design it. This intimate knowledge is put to the test when she and the crew are sent on a mission to the bottom of the Mariana Trench to investigate the presence of an untapped source of biomass, which holds the potential to cure diseases and form the foundation of new crops. Every nation on the war-torn planet wants it, and the Bancroft races to collect it before it falls into the hands of an alliance of Chinese and Russian communists. As villainous pursuers rapidly close in topside, Kel makes a command decision to take the Bancroft deeper into the trench’s vast network of undersea caverns. There, Kel and the crew realize there’s no easy way out. They’re unable to back out the way they entered, and they can’t use a high-powered torpedo to create a new escape route for fear of collapsing the caverns. Out of options, Kel orders the crew to dive even deeper. Willson ratchets up the danger the deeper they go, and as the super-sophisticated Bancroft begins to strain under the enormous pressures, new threats to the crew’s integrity spring up. Close-quarter violence breaks out, described in sometimes-brutal detail. In the prologue, Willson also unexpectedly introduces a pair of celestial entities who oversee and comment on the proceedings, known as “the Builders.” One, named Willow, has a vested interest in the tiny humans fighting for survival at the bottom of the ocean, but her fellow god, Helios, fumes over her steadfast devotion: “What do you see in this pale blue dot of yours?” Will Kel and the Bancroft escape? Will the Builders intervene? Will the planet survive? Willson takes obvious delight in keeping his readers guessing as the novel goes on.
An offbeat and unyielding undersea adventure that bubbles with tension.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781958800126
Page Count: 392
Publisher: WideAsleep Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK TO SCREEN
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