A fast-paced detective novel, enhanced by exceptional characters and a striking ending.
A California private eye’s investigation of a questionable suicide leads to a clandestine club and a series of murders in Cassiday’s (Wipeout, 2017, etc.) mystery-thriller.
When horror novelist Bart Dillinger realizes that his girlfriend, Jackie Merced, has been missing without a trace since the previous night, he’s reluctant to call the cops. He fears that they’ll think he’s overreacting; what if she’s just stranded somewhere with a dead cellphone battery? So he hires PI Ethan Carr, who verifies that Jackie is, sadly, dead. Cops recently found her shot to death in a car submerged in the ocean; amazingly, they write it off as suicide, theorizing that she shot herself while simultaneously driving off a cliff. Neither Carr nor Dillinger buy that, so the PI stays on the case. It turns out Jackie belonged to the Russian Club, a secret organization whose membership requires another member’s recommendation. Carr attempts to infiltrate it while also trying to tie Jackie’s death with two other victims, who also died from gunshots to the head. Then he comes home to find human eyeballs nailed to his front door. As if that weren’t enough, someone later tosses a stick of dynamite into his car—while he’s inside it. Brief chapters and short, punchy dialogue give Cassiday’s story a consistently brisk tempo. This is particularly effective during Carr’s rapid-fire interrogations of various people, including his own client. Dillinger, too, is a sensational character; his need to learn what happened to Jackie seemingly, and intriguingly, competes with his yearning for a successful writing career. The possibility that Dillinger might be headed toward a mental collapse later becomes a potent subplot—one that overshadows the main investigation, which becomes stagnant. However, a late introduction of a villainous character ramps up the menace, and the wrap-up of Carr’s case, and the grim coda, are memorable.
A fast-paced detective novel, enhanced by exceptional characters and a striking ending.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5483-0766-0
Page Count: 561
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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