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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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
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