An introspective detective’s involvement in a series of brutal crimes is both professional and personal.
DS Aector McAvoy is a shy but physically impressive Scot with a Romany wife. Many of his colleagues are angry with him for bringing down a dishonest cop, and he’s been required to attend six sessions with a police-approved counselor. The sessions are not going well, but Detective Superintendent Trish Pharaoh, McAvoy’s boss at Serious and Organized Crime, still has complete faith in him. Half the unit is investigating the violent escalation in crime linked to a mysterious new group taking over the drug trade in and about Hull. McAvoy and Pharaoh, in the other half of the unit, are on the trail of a serial killer. They suspect the killings are revenge for what the killer considers a miscarriage of justice. Sebastien Hoyer-Wood, a well-connected young man, had committed a series of violent rapes he forced the victims’ families to watch. But when he was caught, his college friend, now a psychiatrist, managed to get him committed to a posh mental home rather than jail. Now a number of people who saved Hoyer-Wood’s life when he was severely beaten by a victim’s husband become targets of the killer. Using blackmail as a tool, the drug kingpin meanwhile catches several police officers in his web. McAvoy himself becomes a target when his wife, Roisin, beats up a dealer who is attacking a friend accidentally in possession of some drugs and takes the money the dealer initially offered as a bribe before he lost his temper. Even though he and his family are is serious danger from the enigmatic drug kingpin, McAvoy can’t let go of the complicated murder case.
Compelling characters and a knotty mystery make the third from Mark (Original Skin, 2013, etc.) stand out from other procedurals.
Pub Date: July 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16820-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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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