The perfect bonbon to pick up for distraction during those long production numbers at the actual Oscars.
Think the competition among Oscar nominees is a blood sport? You have no idea.
Desperation at Dawn has snared Academy Award nominations for writer/director Peter Barrington; his wife, composer Hattie Barrington; lead actress Tessa Tweed; supporting actor Mark Weldon; and Tessa’s husband, Ben Bacchetti, who, as head of Centurion Studios, would bask in the award for best picture. Tessa’s nomination is nice for her, but it grates on Viveca Rothschild, the blonde bombshell who, determined that her own third nomination will be the charm, resolves to do whatever it takes to undermine Tessa, beginning with getting hired on Trial by Fire, Tessa’s aptly named new film, and planting snippy items about her in gossip columns. But that’s far from the biggest problem lurking beneath the tinsel. Viveca’s boyfriend, Iraq War vet Bruce, has PTSD and a much less nuanced approach than his girlfriend to stopping Tessa in her tracks. Even worse, crime boss Gino Patelli, suspecting that his uncle and predecessor, Carlo Gigante, was offed by Centurion producer Billy Barnett, hires a series of variously hapless underlings to find and kill him. As Billy tells his attorney, Peter’s father Stone Barrington, when he’s arrested for a rare murder he didn’t commit, “It seems to be open season on Billy Barnett.” But the predators’ job is considerably complicated by the fact that Billy, like Mark Weldon, is an alter ego of former CIA operative Teddy Fay, who effortlessly spots every Patelli employee early on, switches identities in a flash to escape them, and shoots them when he can’t. So the suspense in this enjoyably weightless tale is focused on the climactic Academy Award ceremonies. Who wants to bet that Tessa or Teddy will get killed or that Desperation at Dawn won’t sweep the categories in which it’s nominated?
The perfect bonbon to pick up for distraction during those long production numbers at the actual Oscars.Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-08325-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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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