Witnessing a bloodbath of this scope is like trying to develop rapport with individual ants: characters barely have time to...
A former policeman’s retirement is thrown off course by a deranged killer’s deadly spree.
Detective Superintendent Henry Christie is just starting to relish life as part owner of a pub in sleepy Kendleton. The Tawny Owl has just hosted its first wedding reception, and Henry’s fiancee, Alison Marsh, looks forward to a raft of future bookings. Little does the ex-copper know that he’s squarely in the sights of a skilled assassin. Even when an intruder breaks into the inn and tries to abduct Alison’s 20-something stepdaughter, Ginny, the would-be kidnapper leaves no clue that Henry (Unforgiving, 2015, etc.) is his real target. Since Ginny spends the day after the attack in the hospital with Alison at her side, it’s down to Henry to visit Lord Chalmers, who wants to host a birthday bash for his daughter at the Owl. When two thugs in Range Rovers turn up at Chalmers’ estate, Henry begins to suspect something may be off. His suspicions are confirmed when one of his lordship’s two security guards shoots the other dead. Then it’s game on. The Range Rover guys take out Chalmers, shoot down his wife’s plane for good measure, and chase Henry into the woods. With Henry gone, the body count starts its stratospheric rise. Pretty much everyone seems to be in the cross hairs, and it’s not clear how the killings could possibly be linked except that two geeks from Whitehall Street want to shut down the local police investigation.
Witnessing a bloodbath of this scope is like trying to develop rapport with individual ants: characters barely have time to show up before they’re erased. This one is strictly for readers who want action without any stake in who’s onstage.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8680-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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