A formulaic twofer combines some interesting philosophical questions with more familiar charges of Beltway corruption that...
Not one but two exciting new cases for Coulter’s FBI (Insidious, 2016, etc.).
Much to the displeasure of Detective Aldo Mayer of the D.C. Metro Police, Special Agent Dillon Savitch sneaks into the home of Kara Moody, a pregnant woman who's being held hostage by a seemingly crazy young man who's raving about unspecified dangers to both of them. After Savitch is forced to shoot the unidentified man, both he and Kara end up in the hospital—Kara in labor. Savitch is worried about the John Doe, who's still unconscious, and asks the police to provide protection, which Mayer pulls without timely notification. Only the presence of Kara, who's visiting his hospital room, saves the man from an assassin. When Kara’s newborn son, Alex, is kidnapped from the hospital, Savitch thinks finding his father may provide answers. Unfortunately, Kara remembers nothing of the party she attended at a friend’s house where she suspects she was roofied, raped, and impregnated. Savitch’s wife, Sherlock, works with the team that’s been set up to find missing babies while Savitch hunts for answers to the unidentified man’s background and an unusual drug found in his system. Meanwhile, Irish charmer Liam Hennessey , who prefers the moniker Manta Ray, is daringly broken loose while he’s on his way to prison for robbery and murder. Savitch asks ex–Army Ranger Special Agent Jack Cabot to join one of his new agents, Cam Wittier, in leading the manhunt because he knows that the escapee and his rescuers are headed into the Daniel Boone National Forest. The pair join a forest ranger and Police Chief Harbinger in a dangerous hunt. Hennessey, who had hidden the proceeds from his robbery of a bank's safe-deposit vaults, has apparently been freed by someone desperate to get back one of the missing items. In order to solve both cases, Savitch and his teams must go way beyond ordinary police work to come up with some surprising and horrifying motives.
A formulaic twofer combines some interesting philosophical questions with more familiar charges of Beltway corruption that could be ripped from the latest headlines.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3806-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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