A raucously entertaining actioner with a sting of social satire.
A disgraced politician, a soldier of fortune, and a suburban mom take on a conspiracy to wreck civilization in this series-starting thriller.
Bond’s surprisingly plausible story envisions an America that’s been destabilized by the Blind Mice, a group of hacker anarchists bent on destroying corporations. Battling them on behalf of the American Dynamics conglomerate are security contractors Quaid Rafferty, a former Massachusetts governor who was impeached over a relationship with a sex worker, and his associate Durwood Oak Jones, a straight-arrow ex-Marine from Appalachia. They recruit Molly McGill, a single mom and private eye in New Jersey, to infiltrate the Mice. This requires her to become a celebrated left-leaning blogger and then navigate the collective’s Byzantine security protocols and tattoo rituals. Molly finds their leader Josiah, a young prophet given to long-winded rants against the system, to be a little “Crazy,” and their member Piper Jackson, a hacktivist trying to rescue her brother from an unjust prison sentence, to be idealistic. The Mice’s insurrection darkens when Josiah murders a health-management company executive and Piper unleashes a computer virus that wipes out most of the world’s data. The novel then swerves towards a more gonzo dystopia as chaos erupts, governments crumble, biker gangs set up highway checkpoints, and Fabienne Rivard, a dastardly Frenchwoman with ties to both the Mice and Quaid, positions her own sinister conglomerate to take over the world. Quaid, Durwood, and Molly duly target her Paris headquarters—a cross between a postmodern office park, a cutting-edge tech lab, and a medieval dungeon—where they face not only Fabienne’s minions, but also her organization’s bizarre scientific experiments.
Bond’s yarn, the first in his Third Chance Enterprises series, features crackerjack action scenes as well as a sly parody of the symbiosis between activist movements and the corporatocracy, all in vividly evocative prose: “His bones didn’t seem quite to fit, elbows and knees jangling liquidly,” Molly observes of the oddly charismatic Josiah. “He was impossible to look away from, his gait hypnotic, his kaleidoscopic limbs slashing the space between us.” The characters are colorful but rendered with complex nuance: Quaid, for example, is an obsequious, morally flexible showboat who’s confident that he can talk his way out of almost any situation; Durwood is a laconic technician with moral rectitude that can be too unyielding. Bond’s writing is well observed and engrossing in a range of registers, from tough-guy posturing—“I expect you’re wishing you had what hangs in my right trouser holster: a Webley top-break .455 caliber revolver”—to the perpetual uproar of Molly’s home life: “It started out smoky when I burned an omelet, distracted by the cat’s pre-vomit hacking in the hall. Then Zach and Granny had a pointless argument about when an egg became a chicken.” Even Durwood’s hound dog, Sue-Ann, makes an indelibly wheezy and sad-eyed impression. Faced with a world coming apart at the seams, Bond’s characters stitch it back together with a DIY verve that readers will likely find captivating.
A raucously entertaining actioner with a sting of social satire.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73225-527-2
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.
A medical student is assigned an overnight shift to observe a Long Island hospital’s psychiatric ward and help with emergencies. You’d never guess what happens next.
Amy Brenner isn’t even interested in psychiatry, the one medical specialty she’s never considered for her own career. Nor is she interested any more in Cameron Berger, the classmate who ended their relationship so that he could spend more time studying, and she’s not pleased to learn that he’s switched his rotation with another student so he can spend some of the next 13 hours persuading Amy to rekindle their romance. Predictably, Cam will be the least of Amy’s troubles. Apart from Dr. Richard Beck and nurse Ramona Dutton, everyone else on Ward D is much more dangerous, from elderly Mary Cummings, whose knitting needles aren’t plastic but sharpened steel, to William Schoenfeld, who’s stopped taking the medications that were supposed to silence the voices telling him to kill people, to Damon Sawyer, who’s confined in Seclusion One and can’t possibly escape, unless a power outage neutralizes the locks. Most threatening of all is Jade Carpenter, whose close friendship with Amy ended eight years ago when Amy turned her in for what ended up being only one of a whole series of thrill crimes. McFadden measures out the complications, revelations, and betrayals with such an expert hand that readers anxiously trying to figure out whom Amy can trust as her goal shifts from ticking off a toilsome requirement to surviving the night may well end up wondering whom they can trust themselves. And isn’t provoking that kind of paranoia what medical thrillers are all about?
A superior entry in the night-on-the-nightmare-ward genre.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227271
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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