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BLOOD ON THEIR HANDS

An intriguing lead can’t salvage this unoriginal work.

A lawyer defends a Black man who was brutally assaulted by two bigoted police officers and discovers a deeper conspiracy that endangers his life.

Hiram Garbuncle is a criminal defense attorney in Florida living a messy life. He drinks too much, obsesses over sex, and appears in court so disheveled a judge chastises him. And despite his routine protests to the contrary, he’s something of a racist. He witnesses officers Peter Bullard and Larry Pickens pull over a Black driver and beat him; his only “offense” is having an Obama sticker on his car. Alec Monceau is the victim in question. He’s from Trinidad and has been diligently working in the United States in order to send money home to his family. Garbuncle reluctantly and half-heartedly defends Alec in court, and a verdict is stymied by a hung jury. Later, Garbuncle learns from Donna Malone, another client, that the two cops in question are members of the Ku Klux Klan and likely sabotaged her car in order to keep that incriminating information under wraps. Now, as Garbuncle digs deeper into his investigation, his own life becomes threatened. Brink’s crime drama is ultimately a pastiche of well-known literary and cinematic formulas. The novel offers little that is fresh or provocative, though there’s plenty of easy sentimentality. Garbuncle is an entertaining protagonist—his life is so insistently chaotic it almost seems like an expression of authenticity—but he’s also a prefabricated trope: a hopelessly cynical man who finds an opportunity for some measure of moral redemption. Brink keeps the plot briskly paced and the novel as a whole brief, but this is such familiar territory it will feel to the reader like a much longer work. Finally, given the new ways racial prejudice expresses itself today, the focus on the KKK seems a bit outdated.

An intriguing lead can’t salvage this unoriginal work.

Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-578-26180-5

Page Count: 289

Publisher: Precipice Press

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2022

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THE SILENT PATIENT

Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.

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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

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

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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