Overstuffed thriller partly redeemed by a strong sense of place.
A woman’s probe of her beloved sister’s mysterious death makes her the next target.
American yacht designer Cassandra Brenner has spent five years in Singapore working for the family business, Ocean House, on her most extravagant project ever, building the superyacht Red Dragon. Cass is also involved in unspecified spying activities for something dubbed Operation UNDERTOW. Heading to the Marina Bay Sands Hotel one evening to meet her contact, she is instead bound and gagged by a sinister duo who want to know all about Red Dragon. The scene then shifts to her sister, Nadia, who receives a cryptic message from Cass shortly before a family meeting at Ocean House headquarters in Seattle concerning a powerful competitor. As a result of all this, Nadia is dispatched to Singapore to assist Cass, who’ll need all the help she can get because she is being stalked by the self-described killer and citizen spy Charlie Han, née Han Chenglong. Nadia arrives to the devastating news that Cass has fallen from the 40th floor of her hotel and the police are calling it suicide. Questions about Charlie’s true allegiances simmer beneath the surface as Nickless unspools several familiar tropes: dark figures pursuing Nadia, a mysterious astrologist who predicts danger, secrets withheld even by her family back in Seattle. Nadia can trust no one, not even Cass’ faithful assistant, Emily. The plot regains traction when Nadia returns to Seattle for a showdown fueled by family history. Nickless’ thriller offers local color and occasional chills, with the behemoth Red Dragon standing in for the traditional haunted house, but it sags a bit in the middle, striking the same notes over and over before a clever eleventh-hour twist provides a boost for the closing chapters.
Overstuffed thriller partly redeemed by a strong sense of place.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9781662510014
Page Count: 379
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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