A measured but diverting medical spy thriller.
In Magnani’s third series entry, pathologist and government assassin Lily Robinson finds herself hot on the trail of a poisoner.
Lily, who works as a consultant at a Boston medical school, uses her toxicological skills assassinations in her secret job as an assassin for “The Agency.” Now her case officer has paired her with a forensic pathologist to investigate a U.S. senator’s death, which initially seems to be the result of natural causes. Signs of a lethal poison reveal a murder—one that shares similarities with that of a politician in the fictional Eastern European country of Jokovikstan. It turns out that Lily’s Agency partner and soulmate, Jean Paul Moreau Marchand, is investigating the latter crime, but the pair are still cooling off from a previous argument, which may be why she later finds the allure of another colleague so tempting. She eventually traces the poison (and poisoner) to the Middle East, but it’s clear that someone is trying to cover their tracks. Lily soon switches to assassin mode when the suspect she’s after threatens someone she loves. The dialogue in Magnani’s deliberately paced novel features plenty of medical jargon and toxin specifics, which showcases the pathologist/toxicologistauthor’s expertise in these areas, although some readers may wish that there was a bit more explanation at times. The characters, however, are well developed, drawing on series-established backstories. Lily, for example, deals with a shocking, recent discovery that her daughter, whom she believed died 20 years ago, is alive and attending the school where she works. The fine supporting cast includes another person who was thought to be deceased, and Lily’s friend John Chi Leigh, a Hong Kong chemist and fellow assassin. The narrative perspective shifts as the story goes on, but Lily’s point of view is always the most relaxed. The action picks up moderately in the final act and the ending leaves things open for another series installment.
A measured but diverting medical spy thriller.Pub Date: April 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64599-325-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Encircle Publications, LLC
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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