An enjoyable read but hardly the stuff of legend.
A fast-paced, hemisphere-spanning debut thriller about the downside of starting a new life.
At a conference, Dr. Stephanie Parrish eulogizes her late husband, Jordan Parrish, a Harvard scientist and founder of medical technology company Genometry, who had “dreamed of a world without disease.” Stephanie was told that her husband had been having an affair and that he and his girlfriend died in an accident. She accepts that he’s gone, “dead and buried, mourned after a fashion.” But there was no affair; worried about his finances and his shaky marriage, Jordan had contacted Exit Strategy, which helps people disappear and start new lives for a fee. Meanwhile, a huge insurance payoff ensures that Stephanie and Genometry are financially much better off with his death. The folks at Exit Strategy take their mission seriously—they will kill Jordan and his family if he contacts anyone he knows. But Jordan doesn’t want this situation (he must not have read the fine print), so he desperately looks for a way out as he’s assigned the job of teaching English in Japan. Exit Strategy inserts a device they call “The Angel” into his hand to track his every movement, and when he carelessly “likes” a photo of Stephanie on Instagram, he fears his family will be killed. His escape attempt takes him to the Middle East and to the Chunnel, where he must fight his way to England. Meanwhile, Stephanie learns Jordan is alive, and she wants him back. Lots of blood flows, as does semen in a weird sex scene. Later, a needless oral-sex encounter is surprising given the participants. And there’s an especially grisly and gratuitous cat murder. It’s clear why Exit Strategy wants to maintain client confidentiality, but these dudes must have murder in their business plan. They won’t last long if they have to go to such trouble for every straying client. But the writing is generally good, with plenty of tension and over-the-top action as the protagonists struggle against heavy odds to reunite.
An enjoyable read but hardly the stuff of legend.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-488-09538-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
