A searing mystery with a superlative gun-toting protagonist.
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In the first installment of Hammond (KOP Killer, 2016, etc.) and Viola’s (Blackstar, 2015, etc.) new sci-fi series, a detective on Mars searches for her grandfather, who she thought died 20 years ago.
Human Denver Moon, 31, is a first-generation Martian—born on the Mars colony that her late grandfather Tatsuo co-founded. Her current investigation involves an outbreak of red fever, a mysterious sickness that often turns the infected into raving, homicidal lunatics. In just the last two days, “the feve” has inexplicably targeted 11 of Mars’ original settlers. She works the case with her always-accommodating artificial-intelligence system, Smith, which Denver long ago gave Tatsuo’s memories. Smith discovers an encrypted message from her grandfather, declaring that Mars is in danger and urging his granddaughter to find him. His former partner, Cole Hennessey, the Founder and Peerless Leader of the Church of Mars, insists that he witnessed Tatsuo’s death personally. A skeptical Denver investigates, beginning by having Smith hack into Jericho, the local terraforming project, to scan the red planet for places where her grandfather may have hidden himself for two decades. She’s clearly making someone nervous, though, as she later narrowly avoids a murder attempt. As Denver digs deeper, she gradually exposes a conspiracy that could affect all of Mars’ inhabitants. This short novel boasts prime sci-fi tech ingredients; for example, Denver mentally converses with Smith, which she’s installed in her gun, and she also gets assistance from Nigel, a botsie (robot). The mystery is packed with sometimes-dubious characters. Denver is the most colorful, even if she is totally colorblind—a hereditary trait that makes her immune to red fever. Smith, however, is also engaging, particularly in its hints of human qualities, such as a preference for leather holsters. Sparkling prose animates the inanimate throughout: “One of the freezer chest’s hinges tore free, bolts shooting off like bullets.” The book ends with a prequel short story, “Denver Moon: Metamorphosis,” in which Denver works a case of “robocide” that ultimately ties into the novel’s main plot.
A searing mystery with a superlative gun-toting protagonist.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9986667-2-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Hex Publishers
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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Debut novel by hip-hop rap artist Sister Souljah, whose No Disrespect (1994), which mixes sexual history with political diatribe, is popular in schools country-wide. In its way, this is a tour de force of black English and underworld slang, as finely tuned to its heroine’s voice as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. The subject matter, though, has a certain flashiness, like a black Godfather family saga, and the heroine’s eventual fall develops only glancingly from her character. Born to a 14-year-old mother during one of New York’s worst snowstorms, Winter Santiaga is the teenaged daughter of Ricky Santiaga, Brooklyn’s top drug dealer, who lives like an Arab prince and treats his wife and four daughters like a queen and her princesses. Winter lost her virginity at 12 and now focuses unwaveringly on varieties of adolescent self-indulgence: sex and sugar-daddies, clothes, and getting her own way. She uses school only as a stepping-stone for getting out of the house—after all, nobody’s paying her to go there. But if there’s no money in it, why go? Meanwhile, Daddy decides it’s time to move out of Brooklyn to truly fancy digs on Long Island, though this places him in the discomfiting position of not being absolutely hands-on with his dealers; and sure enough the rise of some young Turks leads to his arrest. Then he does something really stupid: he murders his wife’s two weak brothers in jail with him on Riker’s Island and gets two consecutive life sentences. Winter’s then on her own, especially with Bullet, who may have replaced her dad as top hood, though when she selfishly fails to help her pregnant buddy Simone, there’s worse—much worse—to come. Thinness aside: riveting stuff, with language so frank it curls your hair. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02578-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL FICTION
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