A pleasingly complex adventure tale, despite some uneven characterization.
A visionary and her tough-as-nails security chief battle the plans of a shady trillionaire.
This latest installment in the author’s Cain series, following A Desperate Measure (2024), sees the return of Francesca Pieralisi, a former mayor of Venice, Italy, turned ecological visionary, and her tough, dour lover and security head, Cain, as they navigate a gritty near-future world. Progress on Francesca’s passion project, a massive seawall intended to foster necessary agriculture in lands facing rising sea levels, is threatened by a seemingly unlikely problem: a series of events that have affected the availability of tin needed for the manufacture of worker exoskeletons. The European Union enlists Francesca and Cain to travel to various international hotspots to determine the causes of the tin crisis and possible solutions. This, of course, forces them to confront many dangers—the worst of which may be a shadowy figure named Irrfan Singh, who’s the head of the vast conglomerate Omnipicorp, headquartered in an orbiting space station. Singh has his own intel, his own army, and perhaps his own reasons for wanting to see Francesca’s seawall fail. As in the previous two volumes of James’ series, the steady, strong highlight of this latest Cain adventure is the elaborate worldbuilding, which lays out a complicated world to come with many moving parts, addressing such thorny issues as international politics, personal technology, and the long-term effects of climate change. The author has a penchant for breezy Hollywood-style dialogue, although some readers may find the novel’s sex scenes cringe-inducing, due to unconvincing chemistry between the two leads: “Despite the waves of orgasm rising ever higher within her, cresting nearly above consciousness, a part of Francesca held ecstasy at bay and watched Cain intently.” That said, James delivers the main action of the complicated techno-thriller plot with energy and conviction. Overall, it’s a fast-paced tale of suspense featuring some intriguing moral compromises.
A pleasingly complex adventure tale, despite some uneven characterization.Pub Date: May 1, 2025
ISBN: 9798308750598
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.
Weir’s latest is a page-turning interstellar thrill ride that follows a junior high school teacher–turned–reluctant astronaut at the center of a desperate mission to save humankind from a looming extinction event.
Ryland Grace was a once-promising molecular biologist who wrote a controversial academic paper contesting the assumption that life requires liquid water. Now disgraced, he works as a junior high science teacher in San Francisco. His previous theories, however, make him the perfect researcher for a multinational task force that's trying to understand how and why the sun is suddenly dimming at an alarming rate. A barely detectable line of light that rises from the sun’s north pole and curves toward Venus is inexplicably draining the star of power. According to scientists, an “instant ice age” is all but inevitable within a few decades. All the other stars in proximity to the sun seem to be suffering with the same affliction—except Tau Ceti. An unwilling last-minute replacement as part of a three-person mission heading to Tau Ceti in hopes of finding an answer, Ryland finds himself awakening from an induced coma on the spaceship with two dead crewmates and a spotty memory. With time running out for humankind, he discovers an alien spacecraft in the vicinity of his ship with a strange traveler on a similar quest. Although hard scientific speculation fuels the storyline, the real power lies in the many jaw-dropping plot twists, the relentless tension, and the extraordinary dynamic between Ryland and the alien (whom he nicknames Rocky because of its carapace of oxidized minerals and metallic alloy bones). Readers may find themselves consuming this emotionally intense and thematically profound novel in one stay-up-all-night-until-your-eyes-bleed sitting.
An unforgettable story of survival and the power of friendship—nothing short of a science-fiction masterwork.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13520-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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