Robots may not be so different from humans in this fast-paced futuristic mystery.
In a world ruled by robots, a police chief races to solve a murder on a reservation set aside for humans.
Jesse Laughton is chief of police for the newly created SoCar Preserve, a designated area for humans spreading out from Charleston, South Carolina. After a plague almost wiped out humankind, highly sophisticated forms of AI took control. It’s been nine months since the preserve was populated by people, and no one has been murdered. Until now. The body slumped in the alley behind a grocery store is that of Carl Smythe, who turns out to be a cyborg (a human with a robotic arm and leg) and a hacker who developed and sold something called sims. The sims are illegal programs that are the robot equivalent of heroin or hallucinogens—they provide a one-time thrill that can be addictive. The last thing the dedicated Laughton wants on his turf is robot interference with law enforcement, but now it’s inevitable. He’s not at all surprised when his former partner from the Baltimore police department shows up. Kir is a robot so finely designed he’s barely distinguishable from a human, except when he does something like mend a shotgun wound by twisting a few wires in his shoulder back together. Kir is also probably Laughton’s best friend. It turns out he’s not even there about Smythe’s murder, although it may be connected to five robocides he’s investigating back in Baltimore. Winter does his worldbuilding gracefully, weaving the details of this future into the investigation as it builds rather than veering off into long blocks of exposition. He also grounds the story in Laughton’s family life. His wife, Betty, is dedicated to two subversive causes: She helps run a school to educate human children and a fertility clinic to grow the population (“A Baby in Every Belly”). Laughton’s relationship with his 8-year-old daughter, Erica, is a believable bond of loving exasperation. One quality humans and robots still share is prejudice toward each other, and Laughton and Kir must struggle with that to solve the case.
Robots may not be so different from humans in this fast-paced futuristic mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9788-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
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