ROBERT SIEGEL, host:
Now, from high to low tech: books. Alan Cheuse has this review of four new thrillers.
ALAN CHEUSE: Veteran thriller writer Lincoln Child sets his new novel, "Terminal Freeze," on the ice above the Arctic Circle. As a team of scientists arrive in an old military base, it's the novel that heats up when they dig around in the old lava tubes of a dormant arctic volcano and discover an ancient, apparently flash-frozen carcass of a large cat resembling a saber tooth tiger. Things really begin to get scary when the frozen beast thaws itself out. Child writes clean sentences. He creates plausible characters. He does this without much seeming effort, and makes a great movie right on the pages in front of you.
Things literally warm up in a new novel by best-selling writer and attorney Richard North Patterson. His new book, "Eclipse," takes place in an oil-rich African nation he calls Luandia, which bears a great resemblance to present-day Nigeria. The eclipse of the title comes on a night when a local political leader raises the stakes in the struggle between his movement in the government, and the government brings down a massive offensive of death and savagery against his home village and arrests the leader on the charge of murder.
Another new thriller I think you'll enjoy is "Daemon," a relentless and nearly maniacal first novel by California software consultant Daniel Suarez. It unfolds a relentless and certainly maniacal plot by a dying 34-year-old computer genius, who wants to turn society into one huge computer game. The technological lure that Suarez manages to impart rather smoothly lends this swiftly paced, blood-drenched, cops-against-computer-genius narrative enough depth to keep you cheerfully reading. "Daemon" is a novel for gamers, or something like a computer game for readers, and about 30 pages from the end, you'll cheer when you figure out that there's a sequel in the offing.
One more novel: "Noir" by Olivier Pauvert. It's a French thriller set in the year 2019, a mesmerizing story that opens in the middle of things with an unnamed narrator discovering the mutilated corpse of a young woman, hanging by a wire from a tree. Our hero is almost immediately off and running in a brilliant tour de force that's something like a tour of France. He's on the lam from Nice to Paris to the Alps, in a nation that's mutated into a pharmacological fascist state. Like "Daemon," this novel doesn't bode much happiness for the future, so the best thing to do is read it now.
SIEGEL: Our reviewer is Alan Cheuse. His new novel is "To Catch the Lightning." He was reviewing the following new thrillers: "Noir" by Olivier Pauvert, "Eclipse" by Richard North Patterson, "Daemon" by Daniel Suarez, and "Terminal Freeze" by Lincoln Child.
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