An ambitious but awkwardly executed thriller.
In Sutcliffe’s debut novel, spoiled rich kids take nuclear Armageddon into their own hands.
Luther Michael Brethren loves his guitar. He’s in a band named Lybyrty and has speakers hanging from the trees in his absent parents’ backyard; he also has a bunch of friends who spend their time hang gliding, selling drugs and talking about the state of the world. The friends call themselves the Children of Atom and claim to have been warped by the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, an event none of them were alive to witness. When two of their acquaintances plan a plutonium heist, the four Children of Atom want in. They plan to use the plutonium to destroy an unlikely target—the small town of Titan—to “dispel delusions of peace and security everywhere.” They go on to raid a drug kingpin’s house to steal cocaine, which they plan to sell in order to buy some plutonium; later, they decide to steal the plutonium as well. Remarkably, the friends know exactly how to pull off a heist of this nature—all are firearms experts, and no one has any remorse about killing, except Michael, who is haunted by the death of the kingpin’s mistress. The novel spirals into farce when the isotope winds up stored in Michael’s house. Soon after, a freak storm occurs, causing all sorts of chaos, including the impalement of one of Michael’s friends and the destruction of Michael’s greenhouse where he had been clandestinely growing marijuana; Michael’s parents, supposedly in Europe for five more months, pick that moment to return home. Michael soon leaves everything behind and splits for Europe, as he doesn't want to be held accountable for the destruction The Children of Atom are about to unleash. The story struggles with stilted dialogue that has characters often pontificating instead of simply conversing. Readers may be confused by the novel’s inadequate scene-setting, which sometimes makes it difficult to understand what’s going on. Intermittent flashbacks and “interludes” further confuse the action, and, as a result, readers may find this short novel’s warring storylines hard to follow.
An ambitious but awkwardly executed thriller.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2002
ISBN: 978-0595216017
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Writer's Showcase Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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