A high-concept pitch, a potboiler on the page, and a protagonist to cheer for, but the authors do not quite tie it all...
Chronicling the life of physician-turned-priest Brigid Fitzgerald, Patterson (The Christmas Wedding, 2011, etc.) and Paetro hurry through a tale where angels fear to tread.
After medical school, Fitzgerald joined Kind Hands, a Doctors without Borders work-alike, and traveled to South Sudan. In this early, compelling part of the book, Brigid confronts primitive living quarters, tries to help orphaned and maimed children, and practices "meatball surgery" in unsterile, chaotic circumstances. The deft descriptions of the almost unbelievable conditions under which the medics work are cringe-inducing. More so is the ugly violence inflicted on combatants, refugees, and courageous charity workers. Brigid falls in love with a fellow doctor. He’s killed, sending the narrative into a whirlwind. Brigid is soon in Berlin, where she eventually marries an older man, a playwright. They have a daughter. Berlin happiness ends soon in tragedy, spurring a return home to Boston. There, Brigid meets James Aubrey, a Catholic priest falsely charged with sexual abuse who’s been made a scapegoat by the church. James establishes his own small church outside Boston: Jesus Mary Joseph Catholic Church. Brigid and James marry. Brigid too becomes a priest, all foreshadowed from South Sudan to Massachusetts by holy visions and mystical experiences. And then more tragedy, allowing Brigid another opportunity to give voice to the cliché Why, God, why? Brigid’s quest transpires against a vaguely described current-day background in which our worldly afflictions—climate change, political violence, social upheaval—are worse by multiples. Straining credulity, however, is the incompletely developed premise that the JMJ Catholic–lite movement becomes a worldwide phenomenon in a handful of years, so much so that Brigid is received amiably by a much-like-Francis pope.
A high-concept pitch, a potboiler on the page, and a protagonist to cheer for, but the authors do not quite tie it all together.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-27402-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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