A satisfyingly twisty thriller from a promising new voice in crime fiction.
In this debut novel, a series of baffling murders and mysterious threats leads three men on a quest for the truth.
In April 1987, life is routine and uneventful for Ed Underwood of Providence, Rhode Island. The personnel director for Barton Jewelry, Ed enjoys spending time with his girlfriend, Liz Reynolds, and practicing karate. When Henry Cohen, president of Barton Jewelry, receives a series of cryptic notes threatening payback, he asks Ed, who was a psychology major at Wesleyan, to review them and let him know if they are a prank or something more serious. Meanwhile, Mike Langan of the Providence Police Department is perplexed by the brutal and random killings of a man leaving a bar and a clerk working at an all-night donut shop. These murders attract the attention of Stan Osiewicz, a police reporter for the Providence Journal-Bulletin. Osiewicz initially suspects that the clerk’s murder may be Mafia-related, and his stories strongly suggest an organized crime angle until he receives anonymous letters indicating the deaths are connected to Barton Jewelry. As the murder investigations intensify, the danger hits close to home for Ed. He discovers that in a case this complex, everyone is a suspect, even Ed himself. Edwards’ tale is a taut and absorbing mystery that successfully weaves together several well-developed stories that unfold with calculated precision. At the center of the action is Ed, a mild-mannered man whose life is turned upside down when his employer’s business is threatened. The author does a fine job of developing Ed’s life outside work, including his relationship with Liz and his friendship with his sensei at the karate dojo, without losing the focus on the tale’s central mysteries. Langan and Osiewicz are similarly well drawn and would make compelling protagonists in future mysteries. The narrative is fast-paced and nuanced, with the perspectives in each chapter shifting among Ed, Langan, and Osiewicz as well as Lou DiNova, the head of the New England branch of the Mafia, a man concerned that he could be implicated in the unsolved murders.
A satisfyingly twisty thriller from a promising new voice in crime fiction.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-912880-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
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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