A sleek, sophisticated cyberthriller in which addiction and artificial intelligence intertwine.
In Pacelli’s technothriller, an Ivy League graduate squares off against a ruthless tech-company CEO’s virtual manipulations.
No discussion of ill-gotten wealth begins or ends nowadays, it seems, without Honoré de Balzac’s observation that a great crime underpins every great fortune. In that sense, Frederick Douglass Monahan, the legendary head of General Recycling, more than fits the bill. Self-assured and suntanned, he’s become Wall Street’s latest darling for his creation of I. Chew, a super bacteria strain that can eat plastic—or any other type of garbage. Still, there’s little to separate Monahan, at first, from any other eccentric, wealthy tech type. His machinations don’t mean much to Kayla Masouvi, a graduate of Harvard Business School who dreams of becoming a professional poker player. Instead, she must buckle down and face the reality of co-signing fines for her father, who’s languishing in prison for insider trading offenses. Monahan, who’s had his eye on Kayla for some time, proposes a high-stakes game of poker to solve her problems (“A bankroll for your bank account...and a job”). To her shock and amazement, Kayla loses the game, making her Monahan’s employee, reporting directly to him and becoming involved in his latest obsession, Resilusio, an immersive but seemingly harmless entry in the virtual reality sweepstakes. The technology allows Kayla to get lost in the 1980s at a concert with synthpop pioneers Depeche Mode—an experience that strikes as “a love letter to a time that seemed easier, kinder, and...cooler.” Then a mysterious stranger rudely gatecrashes her reveries and urges her to get out while she can.
The novel effectively explores this unsettling experience, which prompts Kayla to look beyond the gauzy feel-good façade of General Recycling’s public image and look into the disappearance of her predecessor, Olivia Chen. She discovers that, far from saving the world, Monahan has been harvesting players’ data, using it to create profiles for its AI system, so that users become addicted and obsessed. Before long, the stakes ramp up considerably for Kayla, who loses a loved one and barely escapes with her own life in the process. It’s the unforgiving math of addiction that’s the major driver of the novel’s action, with Kayla helpless to resist her love of high-risk poker—and later, the draw of her desire for revenge; meanwhile, Monahan, the titular Garbage Man, can’t shake his need for power. It’s a struggle that will push them both to their limits, and it will sweep the reader along, as well. As the author suggests, it’s not just the business of crime that results in the imposition of technology and its collateral damage—including serial scamming, rampant self-obsession, and social isolation—but also the notion that one must accept such terrible things as a fait accompli that’s now hard-wired into society, for good or for ill. It’s the widescreen popcorn vision of the film The Matrix (1999), writ larger than life, “minus the giant machines that harvest humans.” The cost of such convenience has never felt so dangerous, or so murderous, as it does in this tale.
A sleek, sophisticated cyberthriller in which addiction and artificial intelligence intertwine.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2025
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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