A twisted plot and even more twisted main characters make this thriller shockingly fun.
Reinard’s psychological thriller follows a family coming apart at the seams as they are victimized by a grisly plot.
Rowan Bishop fixates on the worst possible outcomes—it’s a trait she developed during her chaotic childhood in Philadelphia—so she can’t help but obsess over the dangers and threateningly exotic women that her husband Wyatt may encounter while away on business in Mexico City. Wyatt wants to be a good husband and father to his pregnant wife and their young son Landon, but Rowan’s paranoia and scrutiny leave him exasperated. So, when an alluring woman invites him for a drink in Mexico, it’s hard to refuse…But Wyatt’s slight indiscretion ends with a gruesome attack pulled straight out of a terrifying urban legend. He survives, returning home frightened and sickly but also determined to downplay the events of his harrowing trip. Wyatt is mostly afraid of his wife’s wrath should she suspect infidelity, but the thing he should be worried about is the mysterious and powerful organization that planned his attack, referred to only as “The Network.” Trying to keep Rowan calm quickly becomes the least of the couple’s worries as the Network strikes again, this time targeting their little boy. However, members of the shadowy, international Network have underestimated their suburban target; as Wyatt already knows all too well, “once [Rowan] sinks her teeth in, there’s no letting up until she finds the truth.” As Reinard cycles through the perspectives of Rowan, Wyatt, and several members of the Network, the author develops characters more complex than those found in the average thriller. Even if sometimes it feels like Reinard is rushing through a laundry list of past traumas and justifications, both her villains and victims earn equal measures of sympathy and disgust, adding additional engrossing layers to the surprises and suspense in the narrative. Rowan seems an unlikely protagonist at first, but with her zany arc—from insufferable desperate housewife to an unhinged and unstoppable investigator—the author is clearly having fun with stereotypes and the conventions of both genres. Readers surely will, too.
A twisted plot and even more twisted main characters make this thriller shockingly fun.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781836183532
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Bookouture
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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