A lively thriller that gets tripped up on its own satirical message.
A spurned studio heir attempts to form a real-life Jewish cabal in this comic novel.
Following the death of his father, 20-something aspiring screenwriter David Zelig watches as the family film company, Zelig Pictures, is stolen from him by an anti-Semite. He decides to seek help from the fabled Elders of Zion—the shadowy Jewish cabal that secretly controls the world—only to learn that the group is just an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. But, David wonders, what if they were real? Using the rash of recent synagogue shootings as a rallying cry, David enlists his two best friends—straight-laced techie Jordan Brody and carefree playboy Mitchell Joffe—to form the Trio (since calling themselves the Elders of Zion would be too much of a giveaway). As the three set out to gain some influence, they quickly run up against the plethora of secret societies that are already operating in America: Islamic terrorists, the Knights Templar, and even a lost tribe descended from the last czar of Russia. Forced to scramble to keep from winding up the victim of these various plotters, David finds himself tasked with stealing a collection of rare Fabergé eggs, locating Jesus’ preserved foreskin, and preventing a massive attack on a Jewish lobbying group. But can he get his family’s company back? Sofer’s prose is urgent but imbued with a sense of humor: “ ‘Am I glad to see you!’ David lied. He shifted uncomfortably on the back seat of the unmarked FBI cruiser, his arms cuffed behind his back….Special Agent Marco Hernandez was not the last person David had wanted to see, but he was on the shortlist.” The book is fairly entertaining from a purely narrative perspective—there are plenty of twists and reversals as well as some action sequences—but its themes are somewhat hard to pin down. The author seems to suggest that everybody is hatching a conspiracy theory except for the Jews, which seems like a strange lesson to take away from a history of anti-Semitic conspiracies. For all the imagination on display, readers will wish there was a deeper point to be made.
A lively thriller that gets tripped up on its own satirical message.Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-950139-00-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 2025 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.
