In her first novel, Beth tells a spectacular tale of lust and murder in the surprisingly not-so-sedate English countryside.
Anne is married to a highly successful neurosurgeon named Roger and resides in a beautiful mansion in the small village of Cumbria. Middle-aged with two grown children, Lene and David, Anne rarely sees either of her kids (though she speaks to Lene on a regular basis). Anne’s job in life and raison d’être is making sure her house is spic and span and that her husband is well fed. Because Roger spends a lot of time traveling to and from medical conventions, Anne often finds herself alone with her stalwart companion, Lucy, a black lab. One night when Roger is out of town, Anne takes Lucy for a walk and stops for a pint at the local pub. While enjoying her quaff, Anne is approached by an attractive young man, Chris Kennedy, who asks if he may join her. Anne’s acceptance sets her off on a life-changing journey and soon leads to a sensual tryst at Chris’ woodland cottage. Anne then learns of a spate of brutal slayings in and around Cumbria, and, as it turns out, the mutilated victims are all middle-aged women who have been killed with the same murder weapon—an elaborate hunting dagger. At this point, the story launches into a nonstop, chilling thrill ride, packed with murder, lust, mystery and enough excitement to send one’s heart palpitations into overdrive. It’s a unique, well-crafted tale with elements to please fiction readers outside of the mystery and thriller genres. The only flaws are some awkward passages and occasional hard-to-understand verbiage that seem indicative of a non-native English speaker. The first few chapters can seem off-putting because of this language issue; however, if the reader hangs in long enough, the wildly evolving tale soon grabs hold and this minor issue is quickly replaced by the great desire to turn the next page. An exciting, intense tale that overcomes its flaws.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1467001021
Page Count: 299
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
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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