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ARTIFICIAL WISDOM

A taut tale with a disturbingly plausible what-if scenario.

Awards & Accolades

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A fast-paced speculative thriller set in a morally desolate near future.

It’s 2050, and renowned independent journalist Marcus Tully is in a bad place. In the decade since his beloved wife’s death in an unprecedented heat wave, he’s struggled to find peace. As the story opens, he’s swilling artisanal rum before throwing the glass at a projected image of news commentators; the disaster that killed his spouse has become politicized—an event that some pundits claim never happened, despite evident international suffering. However, Marcus, unlike most other victims, has the knowledge and resources to fight back against this perception. In the run-up to a worldwide election, a mysterious whistleblower appears in Marcus’ life, claiming he has information about Marcus’ wife’s death, as well as tangible proof of major political figures using dangerous tech to suppress the very constituents they’ve unhoused with irresponsible climate policies. And yet, the election that’s about to take place—filled, of course, with many of these same politicians—could be the last, best hope to prevent a climate apocalypse. As Marcus is drawn deeper into the darkness of a murder investigation, nothing is certain—not even his belief that his wife’s death was an accident. In this timely novel, Weaver seizes upon big-picture concerns of the real-world moment—including global warming, ethically bankrupt leadership, and the disintegration of trustworthy news sources—to create a vision of a future worth fearing. There’s also plenty of intriguing everyday tech scattered throughout—such as a sort of EpiPen that cures hangovers—that never seems far-fetched. The prose and dialogue aren’t particularly snappy, but readers inclined toward futuristic narratives about present-day issues will find this novel hard to put down.

A taut tale with a disturbingly plausible what-if scenario.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Chainmaker Press

Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.

A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

Pub Date: March 17, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020

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BEAUTIFUL UGLY

“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.

Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.

Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.

“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.

Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025

ISBN: 9781250337788

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Flatiron Books

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024

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