A novel that delivers pretty much everything Silva’s fans want.
Silva takes his hero to where this bestselling series began.
Fans have gotten used to a new Gabriel Allon book every summer. Anyone wondering what the former head of Mossad might be doing during the war in Gaza will not find an answer here. This is bad news, maybe, for readers who appreciate Silva’s engagement with real-world politics, but it’s good news for those looking to this series for escape. This narrative is set in motion by the death of an art historian trying to reconnect a Picasso painting stolen by the Nazis with its rightful owner. Allon is drawn into this mystery by an old acquaintance from Cornwall, the place where he tried to escape his past and where readers first met him in The Kill Artist (2000). As he did in The Collector (2023), the author focuses on Allon’s connections to the art world, rather than his tenure as an assassin and intelligence operative. None of this is to say that Allon doesn’t make use of spycraft and his network of powerful international contacts. Although longtime fans may miss their favorite members of his old crew, there are plenty of familiar characters here. Allon enlists the help of hacker and master thief Ingrid Johansen and violin virtuoso Anna Rolfe. And it’s Timothy Peel—all grown up—who asks Allon for help investigating a seemingly simple case of murder that isn’t simple at all. All of this is fun enough, but it also feels a bit static. In Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2022), Allon whipped up passable forgeries of works by Renaissance masters like Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese in a matter of days. Here, his plan for recovering a Picasso requires him to produce convincing lost paintings by modernists and postmodernists with wildly different styles. The glimpses into Allon’s family life also feel rote. Silva’s fans know that Chiara can do much more than cook and smile while her husband goes off on his adventures.
A novel that delivers pretty much everything Silva’s fans want.Pub Date: July 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780063384200
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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