The undead are just another government conspiracy in this solid, politically infused novel.
An experimental drug revives the assassinated U.S. president, who’s suddenly hellbent on world domination, in Richardson’s debut thriller.
President Alexander Scott Holden doesn’t survive an assassin’s bullets. But brother and National Security Agency Director Tom Holden needs him alive for at least a few more days to follow through with a plan to solidify America’s economic stability. A small group agrees to the administering of a necrosis treatment in the early stages of development. It works, and the president eventually regains his mental capacity. But something’s wrong, apart from his emaciated, undeadlike appearance. The commander in chief is slowly amassing a horde of the undead, and an unforeseen military assault against Haiti is just the beginning of a plot that might entail taking over the world. Despite the undead villains, the novel has more signs of a political thriller than any other genre. The president’s secret reanimation, for one, smells more like a coverup than dead flesh, while he faces off against radicals, the Free Reign Movement, who are possibly behind the assassination with a mole inside the White House. Richardson, regardless of the playful title, takes the horror element seriously, largely avoiding the Z-word and using scientific descriptions to detail undead symptoms. A doctor discussing Holden’s condition, for example, notes “that even modest doses of any kind of stimulant result in acute physical excitation,” i.e., the president is, at first, a biter. The story, however, doesn’t leave much room for humor or nuanced character relationships. But tabloid journalist Grace Livy is a highlight, sneaking over to Haiti to investigate what seem to be walking corpses and even involved in a (mostly implied) love triangle with reporters Danny Chase and John “Jacko” Ledbetter. Richardson pulls away from genre conventions: the formerly dead president isn’t a mindless animated cadaver, and some of the undead are actually living people who’ve become unwitting participants in the drug trials. In the end, the president’s actions could result in a global war, and though an undead apocalypse could happen, it’s the real-world threat that packs the most punch.
The undead are just another government conspiracy in this solid, politically infused novel.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4969-7221-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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