No prizes for plot construction but a scarred, gutsy heroine who surely deserves a second chance.
O’Connell (The Last Night Out, 2018, etc.) hits the slopes with a new heroine whose leading strengths as a detective seem to be an ability to absorb serious physical punishment and a complete lack of fear.
Her love of skiing sent Greta Westerlind from Milwaukee to Aspen 15 years ago, and once she looked around she knew she’d never leave. Her job taking care of 80-year-old Sam Simpson ended when he died and left her a life interest in his A-frame house, a place she never could have afforded on her own. And she loves her job as a ski patroller. But not everything has come up roses. Sam’s children fought her tooth and nail over the bequest; Joel Simpson still radiates hostility every time she sees him; and, most recently and urgently, she’s barely survived an avalanche that killed her ski buddy and secret heartthrob, retired bond trader Warren McGovern, whose pregnant wife, Zuzana, expresses unbridled suspicions about what the two of them were doing on the mountain together—a question Greta can’t answer because she’s lost her memory. Luckily, handsome Dr. Duane Larsen is on hand to help her recover first from the trauma of the avalanche, then from a near-fatal attack of carbon monoxide poisoning as she sleeps. And he makes no secret of his amatory interest in Greta. But she’s haunted by her ex-lover Jack’s warning that bad things come in threes. So far, so menacing—except that Greta’s third adventure involves her rescuing young Richie Alvarez from a sudden accident, inspiring his father, wealthy Mexican developer Pablo Alvarez, to whisk her off to St. Moritz on his private jet for several more rounds of skiing and unrelated complications until O’Connell suddenly seems to remember that Greta has a killer to track down.
No prizes for plot construction but a scarred, gutsy heroine who surely deserves a second chance.Pub Date: July 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8873-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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