Shift

July 5, 2010
At the start of this unsuspenseful alternative history thriller from TV screenwriter and producer Kring (Heroes) and Peck (Body Surfing), 1,963 people see an apparition of an oversized flaming boy in the Dallas sky at 11:22 a.m. on December 30, 2012. These numbers correspond to the year, month, and day of President Kennedy's assassination. Flashback to Cambridge, Mass., in October 1963: an attractive woman in the pay of the CIA seduces Harvard grad student Chandler Forrestal, a nephew of Truman's defense secretary, so she can slip him some LSD. The Company believes the drug allows those who take it to access a secret part of the brain known as the Gate of Orpheus. The authors score points for originality in mixing LSD with the events and usual suspects, including the Mafia and J. Edgar Hoover, leading up to Dealey Plaza and the fatal day, but their implausible hidden history of how the world works never coheres.

July 1, 2010
Kring is the creator, executive producer, and writer of the recently canceled television series "Heroes" which followed the lives of several characters who accidentally acquire superpowers. Peck is a novelist ("Sprout" who has written extensively on pop culture. Together, they have written this "alternative history" of the events leading up to and following the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963. The format will be familiar to "Heroes"fans: fast action, multiple characters, and a bewilderment of subplots that move forward to the climactic event in short hops. When a CIA agent gives Chandler Forrestal an LSD cocktail, Chandler develops the ability to read and even control minds. Everyone wants Chandler; he could be the Cold War's new superweapon. He is pursued by a rogue CIA agent and by Russians as he tries to rescue a beautiful hooker who has also acquired telepathic abilities. Meanwhile, a brainwashed assassin moves toward Dallas. VERDICTThis first title in a projected trilogy won't earn literary prizes, but it's good fun. "Heroes"fans and readers who enjoy such authors as John Twelve Hawks and Neil Gaiman will want to read this. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ"5/15/10; ebook ISBN 906-0-307-45347-1.]—David Keymer, Modesto, CA

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