The closest the hero is ever likely to come to old-fashioned detection, though his creator’s heart is clearly more in the...
Somebody must have changed Stone Barrington’s meds. The studly New York attorney’s latest adventure finds him investigating an actual crime, looking for clues, making inferences, and notching only a single new amorous conquest.
A trio of no-goodniks armed with sledgehammers attack Stone’s Bentley as he and his driver, ex–Royal Marines commando Fred Flicker, wait at a red light. The dunderheads barely damage the armored vehicle, but it turns out that they’ve targeted many other luxury cars, one of them driven by widow Morgan Tillman, whose husband left her a wealthy woman when he fell off their penthouse terrace during a theft by the world’s most enterprising cat burglar. Approached by Morgan, who vents about the attack on her car, Stone takes her to dinner with his old NYPD partner, Police Commissioner Dino Bacchetti; she vents in turn to him; and the car attackers, having ushered Stone and Morgan to the same bed, disappear as completely as the Ford Edsel to make room for Arthur Steele, who tells Stone about Vincent Van Gogh’s very last painting (no, not the one with the crows over the cornfield), which was apparently stolen from the Tillman penthouse at the same time Mark Tillman was killed. Steele’s firm is about to pay Morgan the $60 million for which the painting was insured, but he suspects that it’s actually a consummate forgery by Tillman neighbor Angelo Farina, whose son, Pio, along with his girlfriend, sculptor Ann Kusch, inflame Dino’s suspicions by lying about where they were during the break-in. Steele offers Stone $8 million to recover the painting within the week—an offer Stone, realizing that the payment may have to see him through two or three more heavy-spending installments (Indecent Exposure, 2017, etc.), ups to $12 million before he begins searching for the painting, which passes improbably from one crook to another, each with a more inflated assessment of its true value.
The closest the hero is ever likely to come to old-fashioned detection, though his creator’s heart is clearly more in the chase than the solution.Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1714-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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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