It’s hard to say who’s more manipulative, the narrator or her creator, but TV’s Desperate Housewives would feel right at...
In this psychological mystery from McGovern (Eye Contact, 2006, etc.), a former librarian is exonerated after serving 12 years in prison for a neighbor’s murder and returns to her suburban Connecticut neighborhood to find the real killer.
Betsy explains that she confessed to murdering Linda Sue, not because she remembered committing the crime but because she didn’t. When she found blood on her nightgown she assumed that she had bludgeoned Linda Sue to death during one of the sleepwalking episodes she’d been suffering ever since her troubled childhood. She was assured she would be found innocent on psychological grounds, but incompetent counsel and neighbors’ unwillingness to testify in her defense sunk her case. Once she was in prison, the unexpectedly satisfying life she made for herself, complete with friends and a beau from the men’s facility next door, showed her how hollow her marriage to husband Paul had been, and she divorced him. Now DNA evidence proves her innocence. With no home waiting, she accepts an invitation from her one loyal neighbor, Marianne, to revisit Juniper Lane. Trying to solve Linda Sue’s murder on her own, Betsy is soon swamped by a plethora of secrets and possible lies. Is Paul gay? Why did Marianne’s daughter Trish run away, and what experiments is Marianne’s husband Roland conducting in Marianne’s basement (where he and Betsy once shared a passionate kiss)? Why did Geoffrey, Paul’s childhood friend—a flirtatious, award-winning author whose affair with Linda Sue was cited by prosecutors as one cause for Betsy’s murderous jealousy—undermine her case? But as Betsy dribbles out pieces of information, it becomes clear that she is not exactly a reliable narrator. Not only is the extent of her pathologies troubling, she has always known more facts about that fatal night than she’s let on.
It’s hard to say who’s more manipulative, the narrator or her creator, but TV’s Desperate Housewives would feel right at home on creepy Juniper Lane.Pub Date: June 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02203-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying...
King (Under the Dome, 2009, etc.) adds counterfactual historian to his list of occupations.
Well, not exactly: The author is really turning in a sturdy, customarily massive exercise in time travel that just happens to involve the possibility of altering history. Didn’t Star Trek tell us not to do that? Yes, but no matter: Up in his beloved Maine, which he celebrates eloquently here (“For the first time since I’d topped that rise on Route 7 and saw Dery hulking on the west bank of the Kenduskeag, I was happy”), King follows his own rules. In this romp, Jake Epping, a high-school English teacher (vintage King, that detail), slowly comes to see the opportunity to alter the fate of a friend who, in one reality, is hale and hearty but in another dying of cancer, no thanks to a lifetime of puffing unfiltered cigarettes. Epping discovers a time portal tucked away in a storeroom—don’t ask why there—and zips back to 1958, where not just his friend but practically everyone including the family pets smokes: “I unrolled my window to get away from the cigarette smog a little and watched a different world roll by.” A different world indeed: In this one, Jake, a sort of sad sack back in Reality 1, finds love and a new identity in Reality 2. Not just that, but he now sees an opportunity to unmake the past by inserting himself into some ugly business involving Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, various representatives of the military-industrial-intelligence complex and JFK in Dallas in the fall of 1963. It would be spoiling things to reveal how things turn out; suffice it to say that any change in Reality 2 will produce a change in Reality 1, not to mention that Oswald may have been a patsy, just as he claimed—or maybe not. King’s vision of one outcome of the Kennedy assassination plot reminds us of what might have been—that is, almost certainly a better present than the one in which we’re all actually living. “If you want to know what political extremism can lead to,” warns King in an afterword, “look at the Zapruder film.”
Though his scenarios aren’t always plausible in strictest terms, King’s imagination, as always, yields a most satisfying yarn.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2
Page Count: 864
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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