Even readers who see the murder's inescapable solution coming long in advance will be deeply shaken when it arrives.
Kent charts two childhood friends’ bumpy progress since one of them was convicted of killing the other one’s father.
One night 20 years ago, Afton Teachout found herself standing over Shelter Rock High School football coach Rick Carson, who was seated on her mother’s sofa. Since Carson was both the father of Afton’s best friend, Sydney Carson, and the lover of her mother, Evangeline, it was no surprise that he was in the Teachout home, but it was utterly shocking that he’d been stabbed to death by a knife in Afton’s hand. Her public defender, John Gregory, used Afton’s sorry family history and her story of a blackout to lessen the charge against her to voluntary manslaughter, and now, as she says, “I’m free as a bird, though it’s never felt that way.” Alternating present-day narrations by Afton and Sydney with their memories of the fateful year 2003, Kent shows Afton in shaky mental health, popping a variety of pills, and Sydney in a debt-encumbered marriage to her cheating high-school sweetheart, Drew Westfeldt. The discovery that she’s won a $33 million lottery prize promises to change Afton’s life. Or did she just imagine it, the way she apparently imagined that she met with her beloved grandmother a month after Beatrice Murphy died? Indeed, the extraordinary measures Afton must take to get through each day—at one point she lists 10 medications that have been prescribed for her continuing dissociative episodes—make her everyday existence seem as unsettling as her renewed attempts to pierce the veil of her hallucinations to find out just what did happen on the fateful night Rick Carson died.
Even readers who see the murder's inescapable solution coming long in advance will be deeply shaken when it arrives.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781662511424
Page Count: 287
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.
More than a decade after a Georgia man is convicted of a monstrous double murder, an uncomfortably similar crime frees him and resets the search for the guilty party.
In Clifton County, home to the Rich Cliftons and the other Cliftons, the disappearance of teens Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker during the Halloween festivities hits everyone in North Falls hard. Working with her father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, Deputy Emmy Lou Clifton hears the clock ticking down as she races frantically to get leads on the two friends, who’d been secretly plotting to take off for Atlanta after some undisclosed big score. As a longtime friend of Madison’s mother, Hannah, Emmy hopes against hope to find the missing teens before they’re both dead. By the time Emmy’s hopes are dashed, two unpleasantly likely suspects with strong attachments to underage sex partners have emerged, and one of them ends up in prison. In a bold move, Slaughter jumps over the next 12 years to the case of Paisley Walker, a 14-year-old whose disappearance catches the eye of retiring FBI criminal psychologist Jude Archer, who promptly crosses the country to come to Clifton County and take charge—um, that is, consult—on this heartrending new investigation. Emmy, suddenly and shockingly deprived of counsel from the parents who’ve supported her all her life, doesn’t get along any better with Jude than with the larger circle of Cliftons and the Clifton-Cliftons. But together they identify one new suspect, then another, before a shootout that arrives so early you just know there are still more surprises to come.
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063336773
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
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