A smoothly written but underdramatized novel about a toxic relationship between housemates in Southern California.
Chicago writer and teacher Macon Fleischer debuts with a suspense novel about a woman whose life turns creepy after a con artist responds to her Craigslist ad for a roommate.
Twenty-five-year-old Donna is lucky enough to inherit a bungalow in sunny Southern California from her grandmother, a welcome change from dreary Chicago, shortly before Donald Trump becomes president. But right off the bat, things are odd. There are no personal effects of grandma Rudy, strange noises emanate from the attic, and in the spirit of countless psychological thrillers, Donna feels she’s being watched. She’s determined to begin a new life, but her job as a receptionist at a beauty salon pays little, and the town of Topanga is a bit pricey. Forced to find a roommate, she ignores huge red flags when her Craigslist ad brings a response from the older, gay Joshua Flowers, who had “something mysterious” about him, “a calming quiet that left room for a lot of questions.” When Donna finds that the stink in his room comes from dead mice he feeds an enormous python he’s hidden in his closet, she barely protests, although it’s clear that her new roommate is bad news, especially after he balks at paying rent. Macon Fleischer is a smooth writer who keeps the nasty details about Joshua unfolding at a steady clip and effectively conveys the setting. Early on, Donna finds 20 feet of shed snakeskin near her door: “Topanga was known as ‘the Snake Pit,’ but for the rattlesnakes and seedy residents from the seventies—not twenty-foot-long pythons.” But it’s hard to care about a character who, throughout the book, acts so carelessly and for reasons too often explained, not dramatized. And Joshua is the snake hiding in the flowers, aiming to steal her house and perhaps harm her. As Donna rationalizes his actions, her plight fails to inspire the keen sympathy it should, given that from the start her predicaments have been of her own making.
A smoothly written but underdramatized novel about a toxic relationship between housemates in Southern California.Pub Date: July 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-80405-435-2
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Joffe Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.
What begins as a decorous whodunit set in a gated community on the River Thames turns out to be another metafictional romp for mystery writer Anthony Horowitz and his frequent collaborator, ex-DI Daniel Hawthorne.
Everyone in Riverview Close hates Giles Kenworthy, an entitled hedge fund manager who bought Riverview Lodge from chess grandmaster Adam Strauss when the failure of Adam’s chess-themed TV show forced him and his wife, Teri, to downsize to The Stables at the opposite end of the development. So the surprise when Kenworthy’s wife, retired air hostess Lynda, returns home from an evening out with her French teacher, Jean-François, to find her husband’s dead body is mainly restricted to the manner of his death: He’s been shot through the throat with an arrow. Suspects include—and seem to be limited to—Richmond GP Dr. Tom Beresford and his wife, jewelry designer Gemma; widowed ex-nuns May Winslow and Phyllis Moore; and retired barrister Andrew Pennington, whose name is one of many nods to Agatha Christie. Detective Superintendent Tariq Khan, feeling outside his element, calls in Hawthorne and his old friend John Dudley as consultants, and eventually the case is marked as solved. Five years later, Horowitz, needing to plot and write a new novel on short notice, asks Hawthorne if he can supply enough information about the case to serve as its basis, launching another prickly collaboration in which Hawthorne conceals as much as he reveals. To say more, as usual with this ultrabrainy series, would spoil the string of surprises the real-life author has planted like so many explosive devices.
Gloriously artificial, improbable, and ingenious. Fans of both versions of Horowitz will rejoice.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780063305649
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.
Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.
While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer, 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.
Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.Pub Date: April 16, 2024
ISBN: 9780143136170
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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