Part stalker romance, part thriller, the arc of this story is a bit blurry, but fans of the You series will be delighted.
Joe Goldberg is back, once again consumed with thoughts about a woman who loves books.
Forced to abandon his son to his deranged ex-girlfriend Love Quinn, Joe lands on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. He begins volunteering at the local library, where he quickly becomes entangled in the life of librarian Mary Kay DiMarco, mom to Nomi, a teenager whose favorite book is Columbine. Because Joe has top-notch stalking skills, he and Mary Kay are quickly more than work spouses, and Mary Kay introduces Joe to her closest friends: Seamus, a Crossfit proselytizer who hopes to date Mary Kay himself, and Melanda, a high school teacher so close to Mary Kay that she practically co-parents Nomi. Neither of them much likes Joe, whom they see as an interloper. As Joe pursues Mary Kay, Kepnes employs techniques from Joe's earlier adventures, including having him imprison characters who threaten his romantic overtures in a special, nearly soundproof room—this time the so-called Whisper Room is in his basement. While using so many cliffhangers at the ends of chapters helps generate excitement (and it will be helpful for the Netflix series), too often these surprises come out of nowhere, introducing a character, for example, who has not even been foreshadowed. Of course, telling the story in Joe’s voice, addressed to "you"—in this case Mary Kay—is the signature of the series, but Joe’s head is an uncomfortable place to be, particularly when he reduces women to faux feminist caricatures or contemplates homicide. The most compelling plot twists come from the women characters, and as Joe's past comes back to wreak havoc on his new love affair, Mary Kay herself throws Joe some unexpected curveballs.
Part stalker romance, part thriller, the arc of this story is a bit blurry, but fans of the You series will be delighted.Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13378-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
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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