A low-stakes, low-octane thriller that seems to have been cobbled together entirely from dead ends.
Between rounds of international intrigue and blood feuds (Scandalous Behavior, 2016, etc.), even superheroes need a little down time, and Woods provides some for New York cop–turned-attorney-turned–world’s policeman Stone Barrington in his latest outing.
Shoe heiress Carrie Jarman Fiske comes to Stone because she’s convinced that her ex-husband, money manager Harvey Biggers, wants to kill her. And Harvey certainly acts the part to the hilt, turning up in public places to gawk at her, following her across the country to Santa Fe, trying to let himself in to her Palm Beach home. But the corpse Stone discovers in a bedroom next door to Carrie’s East Hampton place is that of a stranger, prostitute Darla Henry, who’d been Harvey’s companion at a New Year’s Eve shindig. What does her death mean? Nothing. Stone persuades Carrie to change the will that left her considerable estate to Harvey, but she gets strangled anyway deep in Georgia O’Keeffe country. Did Harvey, who’d been spotted nearby hours before, kill her? No. Even before the hostile ex, who’d claimed that Carrie was trying to kill him, proves a disconcertingly ironclad alibi, Stone has moved on to yet another complication: Carrie’s possession of a choker that looks just like the one Gustav Klimt’s model wore in the painting the movies have forever dubbed The Lady in Gold. Is it the real thing or a clever copy? And either way, will some forgettable jewel thief make off with it before Jamie Niven, Stone’s friend at Sotheby’s, places it on the auction block? If these questions make your heart beat faster, this is the tale for you. President Kate Lee also invites Stone to review the candidacies of three attorneys, one of them his insatiable ex-fling Tiffany Baldwin, for the Supreme Court. Maybe his recommendation will have consequences in some later installment of this bestselling series.
A low-stakes, low-octane thriller that seems to have been cobbled together entirely from dead ends.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17469-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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