It’s the ethicists squaring off against the moneychangers in a bristling, absorbing thriller. After 30-plus novels,...
Man vs. the pharmacogenomics machine.
Headhunters have lured dashing young scientist Richard Parnell—brilliant, charismatic and just arrogant enough to invite hubris—from England to become a rising star (read: profit-maker) at mighty Dubette, Inc., the humongous drug company. He’s to lead Dubette’s global genome project, aimed at converting human DNA research into product. A complex job, one that brings him into early confrontation with spiderish Dwight Newton, his boss. Newton likes it when underlings cringe, a view shared by his own boss, Edward C. Grant, Dubette’s Napoleonic president. Viewed originally as a potential cringer—isn’t everybody?—Parnell disappoints, then seriously annoys. Still, with reasonable caution, he picks his way through Dubette’s bureaucratic minefield. After all, he wants to do big science and has no real objection to getting rich; it’s just that, at the same time, he refuses to imperil bedrock principles, a position that causes an attractive Dubette researcher to become his ally. Though Rebecca Lang describes herself as very “back of the bus” in Dubette terms, Parnell welcomes her support—and, before long, finds himself welcome in her bed. They decide to live together, a plan horrifically terminated by Rebecca’s murder. Police believe her car was deliberately rear-ended and forced off the road into a deep plunge. Police further believe—supported by certain forensic evidence—that it was Parnell’s car that did the forcing. They posit a deadly resolution to a violent lovers’ quarrel. Parnell is arrested, cuffed and jailed: shocks brutal enough to crush the spirit of a lesser man. In Parnell’s DNA, however, there is sterner stuff, and he vows to unmask Rebecca’s killer, or what’s a scientific method for?
It’s the ethicists squaring off against the moneychangers in a bristling, absorbing thriller. After 30-plus novels, Freemantle (The Holmes Inheritance, 2004, etc.), one of the genre’s best pure storytellers, remains at the top of his game.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7278-6106-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
