A strongly plotted thriller about a plague-like epidemic on a space station. Superb research lifts Gerritsen to the top of the ladder as Michael Crichton and Robin Cook wave from below. Gerritsen’s tale doesn—t have the mystical touch that Stanislaw Lem would have added, though the essential mystery here is a fairly mystical monster, a multicellular microscopic organism called the Chimera. A geologist, trapped in a submersible 19,000 feet deep in the Gal†pagos Rift, ties in with an outbreak on mankind’s first internationally built space station (ISS), orbiting earth. The ISS, five years in the assembling and twice as long as a football field, is manned by an international team of scientists whose work, in part, focuses on testing the effects of weightlessness on microbes and viruses. When tested on earth, such cultures can grow only on flat slides. In space, without gravity, they grow three-dimensionally and assume unbounded shapes. Someone has hoodwinked the space doctors by having them test an absolutely unknown organism that has been lifted from bubbling thermals on the ocean floor. This creature has hideous properties that allow it to take on the DNA of any host it enters, be such lab mouse, frog, or human. Thus, any vaccine that might kill the amazing Chimera, whose DNA is part frog, part mouse, and part human, would kill the host as well. The story builds to a Liebestodt of dancing horror as fatal globules of infected blood erupt weightlessly from the dying, float about the ship, and clog the air filters. Meanwhile, the main romantic interest turns on a couple in the process of divorce, astronauts Emma Watson and Dr. Jack McCallum. Doc Gerritsen (Bloodstream, 1998, etc.), a former internist who creates chilling viral disasters, knows all the natural gates and alleys of the human bio-novel as well as she does the musculature of suspense.
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-01678-4
Page Count: 331
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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