A taut, accomplished novel about two lost souls finding—and destroying—each other.
In Valencia’s well-orchestrated erotic thriller, a sexual predator seduces the stepdaughter of a wealthy businessman and sets out to ruin her life.
While in Algiers, rich, hedonistic pederast Pierre LeFanu acquires a young street urchin and takes the boy into his home, where he raises, clothes, feeds and educates him, and also abuses him and allows his friends to abuse him. Georges is too young to understand the vileness of what’s happening; later, at Pierre’s death, he weeps for one of the only times in his life. Regardless, deep damage is done: Georges grows up into a beautiful but heartless, manipulative gambler and sadist. When he meets Serena Cheetham at a dinner party, his good looks and aloofness immediately strike her as the perfect antidote to the straight-laced world of her mother and her mother’s society friends. Pierre’s death leaves Georges with a smaller inheritance than he’d expected, and although he begins acting erratically, Serena is already devoted to him. When her parents’ investigation of him turns up a long string of crimes in which Georges has been implicated (including two incidents where key witnesses subsequently disappeared), they confront Serena, who, after a brief moment of doubt, decides to stay with Georges. The two flee to America, where Serena introduces Georges to some of her wealthy acquaintances, one of whom—her good friend Rosario—echoes the same suspicions about Georges: “I just don’t get the feeling he is trustworthy.” All such suspicions serve only to make Serena more stubborn in her support of Georges, even as his gambling and petty verbal abuse escalate. When the misery of her choices finally overtakes her, she’s only too happy to indulge in the drugs supplied by Georges, who’s now feeling even more financially pressured amid his entanglements with Rosario’s secretly gay husband. As the characters become more and more tense and desperate, Valencia’s story accelerates. Despite occasionally wooden prose, readers can’t help but be enthralled by the descent into depravity.
A taut, accomplished novel about two lost souls finding—and destroying—each other.Pub Date: March 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481787161
Page Count: 354
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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