An adept and chilling cautionary tale—the narrative equivalent of brass knuckles to the skull.
Blending elements of apocalyptic fiction, dystopian thriller, and timely political drama, this novel is set in an America on the brink of collapse.
After much of the country’s leadership is assassinated by terrorists in a coordinated attack at the White House, Secretary of State Elizabeth Cunningham reluctantly becomes the American president. In an effort to not have to rely on Middle Eastern oil, Cunningham evacuates millions of people from North Dakota and Wyoming in order to turn them into oil-producing “Energy Territories.” These territories, run by a ruthless security firm, quickly become lawless areas where anything goes. Army veteran and widow Jennifer “River” Petersen is a trucker in the territories. Her goal is to make enough money to pay off her debts so that she can get back to her young daughter and mother back in Idaho. When she helps a man bleeding in the middle of the road one night, she inadvertently entangles herself in a grand-scale conspiracy where nothing short of the future of America—and its very soul—is at stake. Powered by impeccably deep character development (every major player is insightfully explored, particularly River) and a storyline that may not seem so far-fetched after recent political events—book bans, federal curfews, and digital identity chips—Davis creates a terrifying near future. In this world, fear, hatred, and intolerance are irrevocably redefining the country and what it means to be an American: “We don’t allow anarchists and women with headscarves to roam our streets.” With a breakneck pace from the first page to the last, this book is so much more than just a well-written dystopian thriller. The questions that the author raises should resonate with readers long after the novel is finished.
An adept and chilling cautionary tale—the narrative equivalent of brass knuckles to the skull.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-9858133-0-2
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Flesh & Bone Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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
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