Sigma Force return feels fabulously familiar
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/01/2023 (717 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
In a remote part of the world, evolution seems to have gone haywire: the human population has reverted to an earlier rung on the evolutionary ladder, while the animals and plants have progressed to heightened levels of intelligence. Commander Gray Pierce and the Sigma Force team have very little time to figure out what is going on, and to find some way to reverse the evolutionary disruption.
James Rollins’ Kingdom of Bones (William Morrow, 624 pages, $13) is the sixteenth in the Sigma Force series. If you’re wondering whether the series has gotten a bit formulaic by this point, the answer is: sure, and that’s just fine. The book delivers exactly what fans of the Sigma Force series expect: fast-paced action, familiar characters and a last-ditch effort to save the world. A rousing adventure.
Kingdom of Bones
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In Ainslie Hogarth’s Motherthing (Strange Light, 288 pages, $24), Ralph Lamb’s cantankerous elderly mother, Laura, dies by suicide. Ralph and his wife, Abby, who lived with her, are affected by her death in very different ways: Ralph sinks into a deep depression, and Abby imagines (at least she hopes she imagines) Laura’s spirit has returned to destroy her life.
Hogarth, who’s also written two novels for younger readers, takes nearly every mother-in-law cliché and stereotype you can think of and turns them inside out, taking the well-worn theme of the nasty old woman and making it fresh, funny and horrifying. Just a terrific horror story.
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He’s called Orphan X. The Nowhere Man. Evan Smoak used to be an assassin for the U.S. government until he quit. Now he helps people who have nowhere else to turn.
In Gregg Hurwitz’s Dark Horse (St. Martin’s, 439 pages, $13), the seventh Smoak thriller, Evan is approached by a notorious drug dealer whose daughter has been kidnapped by his enemies.
Evan’s special talents make him the only person who stands a chance of rescuing the girl, but, on the other hand, this isn’t some poor, helpless man — this is a vicious criminal. Is Evan willing to cross that moral line? And, if he does, what will be the cost?
If you’ve read the Smoak novels, it’ll come as no surprise that this one is perfectly plotted and very well written. Head and shoulders above most of its competitors.
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You might know Nicholas Meyer as a film director (Star Trek II and Star Trek VI, Time After Time, The Day After), but he’s also an accomplished novelist. The 1974 novel The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is a classic Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and the recent Return of the Pharaoh (Minotaur, 272 pages, $23) is just as good. It takes Holmes to Egypt, where he looks into the disappearance of an English duke. Things get, shall we say, a little weird.
Meyer is obviously having a lot of fun with the story — the book’s literary conceit is that he is merely the editor of a long-lost manuscript written by Dr. Watson — and if you read the book without getting caught up in the adventure, in the wonderful relationship between Holmes and Watson, then, well, maybe you’re not reading it right. A great addition to the literature of Sherlock Holmes.
Halifax freelancer David Pitt’s column appears the first weekend of every month. You can follow him on Twitter at @bookfella.