Zerries (The Lost Van Gogh, 2006) keeps both great matters and small moving along smartly courtesy of what may be New York’s...
An NYPD detective incongruously juggles a gang of murderous swindlers whose ill-gotten gains are financing international terrorism and a more traditional kind of gang that operates considerably closer to the streets of New York.
Theo Appel, who used to counterfeit documents for the CIA, has been turned away by nearly every cop in town, but Detective Greta Strasser, who can’t persuade anyone in Manhattan’s 24th Precinct that concentration-camp survivor Pauline Kantor’s death was murder, is prepared to listen to him. The story he tells is a wild one. A well-financed band of outlaws has been persuading Holocaust survivors like Pauline, whose assets have never been returned by the Swiss banks in which they were deposited, to file paperwork with the Claims Restoration Tribunal and then killing the claimants and taking over their claims. The most cogent evidence in support of Theo’s theory that the thieves are targeting claimants in several large American cities and murdering them at the rate of one a month comes when he dies himself under circumstances that look like suicide to everyone but Greta. In the meantime, the intrepid heroine narrowly escapes death at the hands of an assassin who breaks into her home and shoots her dog. Greta’s decisive reaction to this home invasion makes it too late to ask the would-be killer whether he was a professional working for the swindlers or a homeboy associate of Viper Xtreme, a gangster Greta can’t help going after even though she’s repeatedly warned to stick to desk duty by both sympathetic Lt. Nick Geracimos and bullying precinct commander Capt. Quill. So Greta keeps working both cases, even after FBI agent Thomas August gets her seconded to the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Whew.
Zerries (The Lost Van Gogh, 2006) keeps both great matters and small moving along smartly courtesy of what may be New York’s toughest female cop.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2717-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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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