Genocide of One

November 3, 2014
Michael Crichton fans will welcome Takano's exceptional thriller, the Japanese author's first novel to be translated into English. President Gregory S. Burns, a stand-in for George W. Bush (it's 2004, and the president has begun wars in Afghanistan and Iraq), is disturbed to learn of a dire threat in his daily brief: a new type of life form has appeared in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that "may lead to the extinction of all mankind." Takano neatly alternates among the players around the globe: the team of mercenaries hired to deal with the threat, who have not been told the truth about their assignment, and whose leader's son is dying of a rare illness; a pharmaceutical researcher in Japan unraveling a cryptic legacy from his late father, who seemed to have anticipated not being around; and Machiavellian plotters in Washington, D.C. First-rate characterizations, even of walk-on figures, lend plausibility to the sophisticated story line.

November 1, 2014
Best-selling Japanese author Takano blends cell-manipulating microbiology and pyscho-cultural social analysis, all while sending four men into the Congo to save the human race.It's 2004, and President Gregory S. Burns occupies the Oval Office. War in Afghanistan and Iraq, yes, but the Heisman Report says mankind's biggest threat is a 3-year-old Kanga Pygmy living in Congo's Ituri Forest. A random mutation created a quantum leap in the boy's intelligence, and the report says it could lead to the extinction of humankind, much as Homo sapiens wiped out Neanderthals. Shifting from Washington to Congo to Tokyo, Takano's narrative zigzags from firefights to power-player conferences to the complex biochemical research required to find a treatment for PAECS-pulmonary alveolar epithelial cell sclerosis. Ex-Special Forces officer Jonathan "Hawk" Yeager quit the Army for big dollar security work to finance his son's PAECS treatment. Leading Operation Guardian, Yeager believes his team is isolating a viral outbreak, but on the ground, he learns the 40 Kangas with whom the superhuman boy lives are to be assassinated to save the world from his mutation. Anthropologist Nigel Pierce is nurturing the boy, and the child is trying to ensure Yeager won't kill him by enticing a Tokyo graduate student to formulate a drug to save Yeager's son. The savant has written GIFT, a program to build and test pharmaceuticals within days rather than years. Japanese racial prejudice gets a rap, but Takano's villain is the military-industrial complex and the United States' evolution into Big Brother via Echelon, a program tracking everyone all the time. Takano's action will appeal to Clancy-philes, but his theme explores how individual psychological frailties shape history, using an administration similar to Bush/Cheney as the bull in the international china shop. The dense, erudite, multiparagraph lectures on microbiology slow down this better-than-average techno-thriller.

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November 15, 2014
Jonathan Yeager, an exSpecial Forces soldier, is asked to take on one more assignment: lead a team into the jungles of the Congo, locate and kill a small band of Pygmies, along with an American anthropologist who's living with them; they're infected, or so the story goes, with a virus that could wipe out the human race. Oh, and if Yeager's team should happen to run across any sort of creature they've never seen before, they should not hesitate to kill it, too. Yeager soon begins to suspect there's a hidden agenda, and he's right: there is a new life form, a three-year-old boy with astonishing abilities who represents a serious threat to the survival of humankindor not. It could also be that this strange child is humanity's savior. Either way, Yeager soon has some very tough decisions to make. This is an exciting thriller, drawing us in despite its wild unbelievability. The translation, by Philip Gabriel, is fluid and compelling, although the narrative does contain some idiomatic idiosyncrasies that point to its origins as a story told in another language. Still, a fine thriller.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2014

Already a hit heard 'round the world and an award winner in Japan, this thriller introduces Takano to the English-speaking world. Akili is so evolutionarily advanced that he can outsmart any supercomputer and see patterns predicting the future. But since he's only three years old, who can trust him with that kind of ability? Not the U.S. president, who orders an international team to go deep into the Congolese jungle to wipe out this threat to humanity. Team leader Jonathan Yeager has other ideas, though.

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