A thrilling crime story, captivatingly dramatic and psychologically astute.
In DePrima’s thriller, a reporter investigates the attempted murder of her police officer fiance and follows an increasingly lurid trail of evidence.
J.T. Kennard (she generally answers to Jess) is content to live quietly; she’s a reporter in Kentucky who largely covers “all things equine,” often in the world of horse racing. Her placid existence is shattered by tragedy when her fiance, Joe Schuler, a Louisville Metro cop, is found gravely injured, apparently the result of a car accident during a terrible snowstorm. His skull is fractured, and he’s put on life support, with his prospects for recovery far from clear. After Jess speaks to Lieutenant Alex Washburn, Joe’s immediate supervisor, she concludes he wasn’t in an accident at all; he was a superb driver, and his worst injuries seem to have been inflicted after the crash—she surmises that he was forced off the road and then brutally beaten. Jess conducts an investigation of her own, one as journalistically painstaking as it is relentless. She is a memorable hero, strikingly drawn by the author. In a heated conversation with Joe’s doctor, she rebukes his suggestion that he may have been overly optimistic about Joe’s condition: “You think you’ve given us false hope. I don’t give a flying fuck about your emotional health. What are you going to do about Joe?” Eventually, another body is discovered in the same pond as Joe’s truck. The dead girl is Samantha Catlett, a college classmate of Joe’s son, Josh, and a girl who was unabashed about her crush on Joe. This discovery raises uncomfortable questions about why she was with Joe, and Jess aims not only to find those who attacked him but also to protect his reputation. This is a complex tale, but the author never permits it to descend into convoluted tail-chasing, even as Joe’s assault is revealed to be part of a larger, gruesomely dark conspiracy. The book is the best kind of hard-boiled crime drama—intelligently conceived, powerfully executed, and, for all its unpredictability, chillingly plausible.
A thrilling crime story, captivatingly dramatic and psychologically astute.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9798987508824
Page Count: 300
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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