Kellerman’s legion of fans will eat this up like his detective eats bear claws.
Once again, best friends Alex Delaware and Milo Sturgis tackle a strange murder together.
A woman discovers her boyfriend, billionaire’s son Donny Klement, lying in bed with three bullet holes in his chest. Det. Milo Sturgis asks psychologist Alex Delaware to work with him for the psychological insights he can bring to this oddball murder. The vic was about to give a one-man show of his photography, a project he’d called the Wishers: He dressed up homeless people as the successes they wished they were, photographed them, paid them $500 each, and let them go back to their lives on the street. Donny had felt that homelessness created unnatural histories, and he wanted to show what his subjects’ lives might have been like if they'd been luckier. But how did the homeless people react to the whole experience? Did someone return to whack him? “The Wishers project itself—bringing strangers with troubled histories into his home—seemed potentially explosive,” Delaware muses. And the vic’s family is strange: Rich dad Viktor’s M.O. in life is to marry a beautiful woman, impregnate her, then leave her. He’s done it six times, creating a batch of loosely connected half siblings: “technically a family, but really a collection of strangers.” (Donny isn’t a nickname for Donald, by the way, but for Adonis.) More murders follow in this complicated and unusual plot, and the characters and clever lines make the story fun. Milo is a smart cop who believes that “stupidity is the fertile soil [he] farm[s],” and the big guy sure loves to eat. A woman backs away from him, “as if there was only so much space to go around and he’d just taken a second helping.” And Delaware doesn’t think much of his friend’s taste in ringtones: “As we waited, Milo’s phone played something that could have been extracted from Chopin’s nightmare.”
Kellerman’s legion of fans will eat this up like his detective eats bear claws.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780525618614
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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