Mr. Bryant and a covey of diverse experts expatiate informatively on witchcraft, code-breaking and national defense. But...
Two cases, from different but equally unexpected quarters, emerge for the staff of London’s Peculiar Crimes Unit.
Beloved of fans but reviled by the Home Office, the PCU is being systematically starved for cases by Oskar Kasavian, the security supervisor hoping to diminish its capacity to bring scandal on her majesty’s government. So naturally, Arthur Bryant, the irascible polymath who’s one of the team’s senior members, goes out hunting for cases on his own. He’s fascinated by the death of Amy O’Connor, a part-time bar manager who was found in St. Bride’s Church after suffering a fatal heart attack with no apparent cause. This is the sort of thing we should be investigating, he tells his more sedate counterpart John May. Before they can establish their authority to intervene in a case that’s officially none of their business, another mystery arrives courtesy of none other than Oskar Kasavian, whose much younger Albanian wife, Sabira, is convinced she’s being hounded by evil spirits. Promised the moon (honors and titles, long-range security, freedom from ritual attempts to shut them down or zero out their budget) if they can figure out what’s tormenting Sabira, the PCU team sets to work. But Sabira’s behavior becomes increasingly erratic—she keeps insulting the well-bred wives of her husband’s Home Office colleagues in distressingly public settings—till she finally turns up dead in Sir John Soanes’ House, the legendary London museum, beneath one of the paintings in William Hogarth’s series The Rake’s Progress without a mark on her to indicate how she died. What can her death possibly have to do with Amy O’Connor’s?
Mr. Bryant and a covey of diverse experts expatiate informatively on witchcraft, code-breaking and national defense. But there’s less warmth or humor or real mystery than in The Memory of Blood (2012) and other recent PCU outings.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-345-52865-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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