First-timer Kava obviously knows the small-town milieu she writes about, though you have to wonder if the men in the real...
Three months after putting a particularly vicious serial killer to death, a Nebraska sheriff’s department faces a new string of child murders that suggest they may have executed the wrong man.
The optimistic take on this new development would be that the latest two deaths are only copycat killings. Reading over Ronald Jeffreys’s trial transcript, though, Nick Morrelli, the Harvard-educated lawyer who all but inherited the sheriff’s job from his masterful father, realizes the picture is much darker. Jeffreys admitted killing one of the three victims—the one whose crime scene least fit the pattern of the others, a pattern that’s continued with the abductions of Danny Alverez and Matthew Tanner. And the profile that visiting FBI expert Maggie O’Dell has drawn up doesn’t resemble Jeffreys nearly as well as several well-respected citizens of Platte City. But since the whole town is in denial, certain that Jeffreys was the perp, and since his own sister, fledgling reporter Christine Hamilton, has suddenly grown so ambitious that she’s constantly embarrassing him in press conferences and in print, what can Nick do? Well, since his bulging muscles are an impressive complement to the unsuitably married Maggie’s shapely legs, he can fall for her. (So much for the promise of hard-nosed forensic detail.) Meantime, since Christine’s the single mother of a ten-year-old son, she can descend into her own hell when he becomes the kidnapper’s latest victim. (So much for the career woman’s dream of having it all.) And readers enticed with the sulfur-and-brimstone promise of a new Hannibal Lecter will have to make do with a monster as unbelievable as he is unsurprising.
First-timer Kava obviously knows the small-town milieu she writes about, though you have to wonder if the men in the real Nebraska are quite as uniformly brutish as in her world. Perhaps the biggest of many disappointments here is that they can’t all get convicted of murder.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55166-573-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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