And so it goes in Coulter land (Eleventh Hour, 2002, etc.).
Everybody’s favorite fantasy: dead math teachers.
But why are they being killed? Rage over failing grades? Beatings or abuse by a geeky substitute? Well, the behavioral science guys in Quantico will just have to figure it out. FBI investigator Dillon Savich, though, is sure the perp is a man. Meanwhile, his buddy Miles Kettering’s six-year-old son Sam has just been kidnapped and taken all the way from Virginia to Tennessee, though the intrepid youngster gives bad guys Fatso and Beau the slip when he climbs out a window. He’s quickly rescued by spunky Sheriff Katie Benedict, who tries to shoot the kidnappers. But one of them, undaunted, is still after Sam. Why? Segue to another creepy house in the Tennessee woods, and meet the Reverend Sooner McCamy, brooding founder of the Sinful Children of God church. His much younger, gorgeous blond wife Elsbeth seems to be very much under his thumb. Agent Sherlock and Katie take a quick peek around the premises when this strange couple isn’t home and find a secret room rigged out for sadomasochistic fun and games. Gee, what do you suppose the marble slab with handcuffs at each corner is for? How about that wooden block with a padded fur top? And check out these whips . . . . Oh, never mind: Is that Fatso or Beau making noise outside? Looks like one of the bad guys is the reverend’s brother. And it’s revealed, none too adroitly, that McCamy is obsessed with the stigmata of Christ, and hopes to find a child whose little hands show the miraculous evidence of Our Redeemer’s wounds. Wow, how did this video get here? It shows a much younger Sam with a rash on his hands that looks like stigmata! Time to torch the McCamys’ house . . . heck, they’re dead. But someone is still taking potshots at Katie. Who? And did everyone forget about the lunatic who was killing the math teachers?
And so it goes in Coulter land (Eleventh Hour, 2002, etc.).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-15056-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2003
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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