An enjoyable beach read for men, but suspense lags until the final pages.
A debut novel of men’s fiction/suspense.
At 59, writer/academic Lewis Melton is a walking mandate for pharmaceutical reform. Plagued by general anxiety disorder and panic attacks, he stumbles through life in reactive mode, pumped up by prescription drugs with alcohol chasers. Lewis’ sagging flesh hasn’t dampened his appetite for nudist Caribbean beaches, where he ogles naked women and rates breasts and other body parts while working on an all-body tan. A call from old friend “Doc” from his Boston college days–his partner in a drug deal gone awry–exacerbates Lewis’ anxieties, which he treats by heavily self-medicating. In the deep purple haze of Lewis’ life, Doc is dead. Or is he? During a 14-day island getaway, Lewis reflects upon his past and sleeps with a young woman who, post-coitus, mysteriously disappears. The authorities won’t allow Lewis to depart until the woman’s whereabouts are known. Back in the States, Lewis’ ex-wife, and occasional bed partner, frets over his avoidance patterns and pill-fueled lifestyle. The narrative is far more effective when it probes the 1960s, particularly at an LSD-pot-wine-sex-fest at a deserted house in the Boston wilds. As a character, Lewis is more believable in his youth, as he progresses from stoner, to would-be criminal, to grad student, steeped in medicinal and orgasmic delights of the flesh. This Caribbean stew simmers for a long time and doesn’t boil until the final chapter. The time structure zigzags back and forth–perhaps to create suspense instead of confusion–and implies that Lewis is in a “time-slip.” It’s difficult to empathize with a soon-to-be-sexagenarian in need of a liver scan who pops pills while leering at women in various stages of undress. At least he’s grateful for that fall on the beach–an injured arm is an easy way to snag a stash of Demerol and Xanax. There’s a twitch or tremor on every page, and an unclear ending. Readers may swear off drugs for a lifetime, but what Lewis has learned remains hazy.
An enjoyable beach read for men, but suspense lags until the final pages.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4401-7211-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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