A promising premise disintegrates into a rather unbelievable story about halfway through the book.
Millar’s sophomore effort derives its impetus from the idea that, for some people, bad luck is inevitable.
Kate lost her parents to a car accident on her wedding night and then, years later, thugs murdered her beloved husband, Hugo. Ever since Hugo’s death, Kate has fought depression, not always successfully. Now, she lives with her son Jack in Oxford, England, near her in-laws, and struggles not to lose her mind. Her problem? She can’t stop computing the odds that something bad will happen. Whether it’s riding her bike without a helmet or crossing the street or someone breaking into her home, Kate is terrified she and Jack will become victims of the same types of crimes that took her parents and husband. So she tries to insulate both herself and Jack from the possibility that something bad could happen to them. She refuses to let Jack go anywhere by himself and wraps them both in a cocoon of alarms, sets unreasonable boundaries and often resorts to bizarre measures. But her husband’s parents are horrified at what they see: Kate is quickly turning Jack into a terrified, neurotic mess. Her mother-in-law says she’ll take Jack from Kate if she doesn’t clean up her act. Then Kate meets Jago, a visiting professor who specializes in statistical analysis. Jago makes her feel alive for the first time in years, and more importantly, he sets about helping her overcome her fears—but are they really unfounded? Soon, she and everyone around her will discover the fateful answer. Millar spins an infectious, engrossing and inventive story, but once she brings a new man into the picture, the storyline starts tilting toward the ridiculous. Suggesting that a woman as fearful and tenuous as Kate would dive wholeheartedly into opportunities to commit crimes and be willingly victimized will stretch the credulity of most readers.
A promising premise disintegrates into a rather unbelievable story about halfway through the book.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5670-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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