Review by Booklist Review
PEN/Malamud Award--winner Baxter delivers another immensely enjoyable novel, following The Sun Collective (2020). Brock Hobson is a seemingly milquetoast insurance salesman and Sunday-school teacher who, in an out-of-character decision, takes an experimental predictive blood test offered by his doctor. The results, provided by the wonderfully named Generomics, state that this predictable and mild-mannered divorcé is very likely to commit a murder. Ever aware of this supposed predilection, Brock must navigate his ex-wife and her homophobic boyfriend and his teenage children and their distinctly adolescent experiences of love, lust, pain, and drama while delightfully odd interruptions arrive at his door from Generomics, as it seemingly tries to put its thumb on the scale to ensure its prediction is right. Brock is a wry joy to accompany through all of this, and his circumspect humor is similar to that of Joshua Ferris' dry and distant protagonists. A deeply funny, profound, and timely comedy about the contemporary overreliance on data to predict everything and anything, Baxter's latest is another excellent tale to add to his much admired and enjoyed body of work.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Baxter (The Sun Collective) pokes fun at religious do-gooders, conservatives, and the medical community in this entertaining if slight offering. Mild-mannered Brock Hobson, a divorced insurance salesman and Sunday school teacher, lives in rural Ohio with his two teen children and is romantically involved with a widowed park naturalist named Trey. At a doctor's appointment, Brock opts into an experimental blood test offered by a startup company in Cambridge, Mass., which purports to predict the future behavior of its test subjects. To Brock's surprise, his results forecast a life of crime, including murder. Though Trey laughs the prediction off, Brock flirts with his supposed fate by shoplifting, and after his ex-wife's boyfriend uses a hateful slur against Brock's gay son, Brock sees red. Then the start-up tries to sell him insurance in case he kills someone, causing him to wonder if he's being scammed. From there, the story barrels toward a violent climax. The ending feels hasty, but Baxter's sharp observations and ear for dialogue are on full display, and he molds a distinctive protagonist in Brock, who thinks of himself as righteous even as he judges others and corrects their grammar. Readers will love seeing Brock break bad. Agent: Liz Darhansoff, Darhansoff & Verrill Literary. (Oct.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
An insurance salesman learns that he's predisposed to murder in this comic novel. Brock Hobson doesn't mind being, as his daughter says, "as predictable as a metronome." He works as an insurance salesman in Kingsboro, Ohio, a town where "a third of the town has a drinking problem, and another third is on meth and/or Oxy," and volunteers as a Sunday school teacher, spending evenings with his girlfriend, Trey, and his two teenage children, Joe and Lena. (Their mother, Cheryl, lives with her new beau, Burt, a doltish subcontractor whom Brock notes "fits quite comfortably into the Mr. Asshole category.") When Brock goes to a doctor complaining of a pain in his side, the physician convinces him to take a blood test invented by a company called Generomics that "predictsbehavior, tells you what you're going to dobeforeyou do it, based on the…arrangementsin your genetic structure, your psychology, and your past and your what-have-you." Brock, an upstanding citizen whose only bad habit is correcting other people's grammar, is surprised when the test reveals that he is "about to embark on a major crime wave." He fulfills the prophecy--well, kind of--when he confronts Burt after the man calls Joe, who's gay, a homophobic slur; Burt slips on a banana peel and ends up hospitalized with a grievous injury. Brock, who's given a gun by Generomics, starts to realize that the company actually wants him to commit a murder: "It's in their interests financially for me to shoot somebody." Baxter's novel is riotously funny, and much of the humor comes from asides: A doctor tells Brock, "Anyway, except for the fact that you're feeling these pains, and you complain that you can't breathe and you've lost your appetite and there's a tightness in your chest, and you feel like you're dying, you're fine"; in another scene, Brock browses DVDs includingAlien vs. Bimbo andVoodoo Chiropractor! At its core, this is a disarmingly sweet novel about family, an entertainment with just the right amount of Midwestern menace. Hilarious and humane. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
