A so-so outing, although Coulter’s fans will likely enjoy the new characters.
Coulter (KnockOut, 2009, etc.) delivers the 14th novel in her long-running series of thrillers featuring FBI agents Dillon Savich and Lacey Sherlock, this time introducing two new major characters.
Helmut Blauvelt, a German national, is found murdered on federal land in Connecticut, his fingertips cut off and his face disfigured. It turns out he’s a troubleshooter for the nearby pharmaceutical company Schiffer Hartwin. On the night of the murder, private investigator Erin Pulaski was stealing documents from the Schiffer Hartwin CEO’s own computer, to help prove that the company had been causing an artificial scarcity of an in-demand cancer medication. She didn’t kill Blauvelt, but wants to know who did. And, coincidentally, Pulaski is also the ballet teacher for the daughter of hardworking, widowed FBI agent Bowie Richards, who’s investigating the Blauvelt murder with Coulter regulars Savich and Sherlock. The primary mystery’s drug-company angle seems to be an attempt to tackle a health-care issue for topicality’s sake—giving characters multiple opportunities to talk about pharma wrongdoing. Overall, however, despite attempts to liven things up—including a scene involving an exploding SUV—it’s a fairly standard procedural, with predictable and sometimes rather lifeless dialogue. A second, supernaturally tinged mystery involves a U.S. senator apparently being visited by the ghost of his dead wife, while at the same time seeming to be targeted by assassins—eventually leading to the vice president of the United States ending up in the hospital. Unfortunately, this mystery is shoehorned awkwardly into the action, and at times feels as if it had drifted in from an altogether different novel. That said, the two new characters, Pulaski and Richards, are fine additions, and the sections that focus on them feel the most authentic and are the most entertaining.
A so-so outing, although Coulter’s fans will likely enjoy the new characters.Pub Date: June 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-399-15653-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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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