A deep dive into drug-company greed that’s hampered by unevenly executed storytelling.
In Lazos and Johns’ thriller, a greedy pharmaceutical company puts lives at risk—first its patients’, then its employees’—in a race to develop a profitable new vaccine.
Executives at Philadelphia-based Onward Pharmaceutical Labs are pushing to complete a trial of RSVIX, a new and potentially dangerous vaccine for respiratory syncytial virus, a leading cause of death for infants in the United States.Nora O’Connell, who markets vaccines to doctors and hospitals, is in a new relationship with Nick Rooney, the charming, ambitious head of business development, and Dr. Siddhartha “Sid” Kumar has been assigned to monitor the vaccine trial. Terrence Saunders supervises them all; he’s a former physician who now cares more about the company’s reputation and earnings than he does about patient safety. Sid raises concerns about RISVIX and the company squeezes him out; later, as the dangers of the vaccine become clear and children start to get sick and die, he and Nora pursue separate investigations and take action. Late-night plotting, a high-stakes heist, and a poisoning heighten the drama before the U.S. Food and Drug Administration finally gets involved, although not before more lives are lost and careers ruined. After the authors inform readers at the start that the novel is “inspired by actual events, dramatized, and embellished for entertainment,” they effectively end it by asking them to consider “what was real and what was a bunch of bollocks.” Throughout, their narrative asks salient questions about corporate accountability, profit, and ethics in drug development. However, the omniscient third-person narrator’s digressions into discussions of such topics as genocide and gender feel scattered. Underdeveloped characters, loosely sketched settings, and a few inexplicable, uncomfortable scenes—as when Nick and Nora adopt a Dominican baby and propose that her mother emigrate to the United States and pretend to be the child’s sister—also drag the story down.
A deep dive into drug-company greed that’s hampered by unevenly executed storytelling.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2024
ISBN: 9798338524527
Page Count: 357
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.
Following the mysterious disappearance of his wife, a struggling London novelist journeys to a remote Scottish island to try to get his mojo back—but all, of course, is not what it seems.
Grady Green hits the pinnacle of his publishing career on the same night that his life goes off the rails—first his book lands on the New York Times bestseller list, and then his wife, Abby, goes missing on her way home. A year later, Grady is a mere shadow of his former self: out of money and out of ideas. So, when his agent, Abby’s godmother, suggests that he spend some time on the Isle of Amberly, in a log cabin left to her by one of her writers, it seems as good a plan as any. With free housing for himself and his dog and a beautiful, distraction-free environment, maybe he can finally complete the next novel. But from the very beginning, Grady’s experiences with Amberly seem weird, if not downright ominous: As a visitor, he’s not allowed to bring his car onto the island; the local businesses are only open for a few hours at a time; and there are no birds. At all. Not to mention the skeletal hand he finds buried under the floorboards of the cabin, the creepy harmonica music in the woods, and the occasional sighting of a woman in a red coat who’s a dead ringer for Abby. As Grady falls deeper and deeper into insomnia and alcoholism, he begins to realize his being on the island is no accident—and that should make him very afraid. Through occasional chapters from before Abby’s disappearance, told from her point of view, we learn that Grady is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and the book’s slow unfolding of dread, mystery, and then truth is both creative and well-paced. Every chapter heading is an oxymoron, like the title, reminding us of the contradictions at the heart of every story.
“Nasty little fellows…always get their comeuppance,” a movie character once said. Deeply satisfying.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781250337788
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2024
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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