Grippando gets underway with a bang and never lets up, springing a series of carefully calibrated surprises in and out of...
Miami lawyer Jack Swyteck’s 25th case is one of his best.
The most dangerous place a woman can be, Isabelle Bornelli was told long ago, is in a relationship with a man. Since then the former Venezuelan beauty-pageant contestant has entered a doctoral program in psychology, married high-powered wealth manager Keith Ingraham, and gone off to make her home with him in Hong Kong, far from the University of Miami, where fellow student Gabriel Sosa raped her 12 years earlier. Her illusions of safety end when she gets off a plane in Miami, where she’s come to take her 5-year-old, Melany, for surgery to correct the hearing loss brought on by meningitis, and is promptly taken into custody for Sosa’s murder. Since Keith is a close friend of Jack, who’s on hand to witness the arrest, she’s got herself some highly capable representation (Black Horizon, 2014, etc.). But all the other men in her life spell trouble. Her college boyfriend David Kaval prepares to tell the court she egged him and a friend on to kill Sosa shortly after the assault in exchange for a deal that will release him from the prison term his more recent convictions for conspiracy and armed robbery have earned him. Her estranged father, former Venezuelan consul officer Felipe Bornelli, plans to direct her defense along his own lines, even if that means sabotaging Jack. Manuel Espinosa, the slick attorney who gets her released on bail after Jack fails to deliver, insinuates himself into her defense in disquietingly manipulative ways. Even her husband becomes a potential danger when hard-driving prosecutor Sylvia Hunt charges him as an accessory and the couple’s two cases are separated, paving the way for a plea bargain for each of them in return for testimony against the other.
Grippando gets underway with a bang and never lets up, springing a series of carefully calibrated surprises in and out of the courtroom guaranteed to catch even the canniest readers unaware.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-244055-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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