An engrossing novel that successfully ponders the justification for revenge and yet remains suspenseful until the end.
A wealthy industrialist’s compassionate act triggers retribution in this thriller set in Paris.
Jonathan Sinclair is a perfect example of the proverb “No good deed goes unpunished.” Life is grand for the rich industrialist, as the woman he has always loved, Kathy Hunter, leaves her abusive husband and moves to France to live with Jonathan. But there are signs that all is not well. His prototype machinery for finding diamonds underwater quits working properly. He and Kathy almost get run off the road on the ride home from the airport. Then there are the strangers lurking around his rural home. What Jonathan doesn’t realize is that these incidents are part of a vendetta planned by a man named Aziz Bey. That’s because two years earlier in Paris, an offended Jonathan halted a sadistic sex show staged by Bey for members of the ultra-secret gentlemen’s club to which both belong: “Bey’s screams about honor and retribution followed” Jonathan as he “covered the girl with his jacket and, lifting her into his arms, strode across the foyer and out onto the street.” Despite the two men’s history, in order to keep the peace at “the Club,” Jonathan agrees to a business meeting with Bey, who tricks Kathy into attending as well. This leads to a night of horror for Kathy, resulting in her monthslong mission of revenge on those who tortured her, while she attempts to keep Jonathan oblivious to what really happened that evening. Herst (Tunnel Vision, 2015) has created an intricately crafted thriller that requires the reader to pay close attention. Her use of flashbacks can be somewhat jarring, but is essential as she slowly reveals the cruelty inflicted upon Kathy. Her benevolent characters are well drawn, especially Jonathan and Kathy, but her villains are rather two-dimensional (the simpering Bey as well as a pompous German industrialist and a blustering American ex-senator). But her narrative is propulsive and absorbing, with Kathy sadly laboring to keep Jonathan in the dark as she meticulously plots her vendetta. Herst again delivers a winning, complex thriller.
An engrossing novel that successfully ponders the justification for revenge and yet remains suspenseful until the end.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5334-2739-7
Page Count: 434
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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