Fans of Scandinavian noir won’t find much to like about this jumbled entry in the field.
A killer who preys on beautiful women faces off against a team of Danish investigators.
Konrad Simonsen—variously referred to as “Simon,” “Konrad,” and “Simonsen”—is Copenhagen Homicide’s Chief Inspector. When he’s called in as he’s about to leave on a rare holiday and asked to lead the investigation into the murder of a woman found frozen in the ice not far from the site of an American installation that has since been decommissioned, he and his partner, Arne Pedersen, realize they may have a serial killer on their hands. Maryann Nygaard has been dead since she disappeared back in 1983, but her body shares one odd trait with another dead woman: they both had their fingernails cut by the killer. Gathering his team—investigators Pauline Berg and the Countess—the Danish detectives soon connect Maryann's killing to the solved murder of Catherine Thomsen, who died in 1997 and whose father killed himself after being accused of her slaying. Filled with guilt and determined to find the culprit, Simonsen and his detectives soon settle on a suspect and begin to unravel his life. The Hammers, a brother-and-sister team, have created a universe populated by some of the least interesting and most wooden characters ever to lead a police investigation, and they toss in clumsy, often bizarre dialogue for good measure. Rather than showing a steadily progressing inquiry as a good police procedural should, their meandering investigation seems more like a series of lucky guesses and chance discoveries. The foreshadowing reads like padding, and the presence of a character known as “the Countess” on a modern-day police department is mystifying. Readers will care little whether or not the murderer is apprehended and even less about the team assembled to find him or her.
Fans of Scandinavian noir won’t find much to like about this jumbled entry in the field.Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63286-297-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
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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