Tense, scary, and twisty. Horror fans will love it.
Hair-raising suspense laced with horror and a generous mixture of romance flavor Koontz’s latest.
Successful California novelist David Thorne has been haunted for 10 years about the fate of the woman he loves. Twenty-five-year-old Emily Carlino disappeared one dark and stormy night (this story has plenty of those), and Thorne suspects the worst. Meanwhile, Ronald Lee Jessup is in prison for the abduction, torture, rape, and murder of young women. He claims to have abducted 14 more than police know about, but he won’t divulge their names. Thorne visits him in prison under the pretense of writing a book, but he really wants to know if the “homicidal psychopathic sentimentalist” killed Emily. A dead-on Emily look-alike shows up in Thorne’s life, identical right down to the golden birthmark below her navel. She calls herself Maddison Sutton and claims to be an assassin of “extremely wicked people,” the only difference from the gentle Emily, who would never have killed anyone. Otherwise, they are both in the “highest rank of beauties” and both age 25 at the time Thorne knows them. Thorne is understandably mystified and suspects a charade. An honorable man, he will accept no imitations. He wants the real Emily, or to know her fate for certain. His search for truth takes him to the “hideous labyrinthine cellar” of Jessup’s home, and truly scary stuff happens. Koontz has a deft touch with phrasing that sets him apart from many suspense writers: “The fleecy clouds alchemized to gold,” and “The sun had mined a golden treasure from the western sky” are, well, golden examples. On the other hand, he occasionally shifts his wordsmithing machine into overdrive: “Legions of rain marched across the roof, lightning napalmed the sky,” and “a thousand knuckles of rain rapped the windshield.” And in the enough-already category: “Vicious hatred…psychotic hatred…homicidal rage…must have hated…demonic hatred” are all stuffed into one five-line paragraph that apparently relates to hatred.
Tense, scary, and twisty. Horror fans will love it.Pub Date: March 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1995-8
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.
A successful Vermont podcaster who’s elicited confessions from dozens of criminals finds herself on the other side of the table, in the hottest of hot seats, over her own troubled past.
Poe Webb was only 13 when she saw her mother, Margaret McMillian, get stabbed to death by the man she’d picked up for a quickie. Poe had vowed revenge, but how could a kid find and avenge herself on a stranger who’d vanished as quickly as he appeared? In the long years since then, Poe’s made a name for herself as a top true-crime podcaster who routinely invites her guests to tell her audience exactly what they did. Now, she’s being pressed, and pressed hard, by Ian Hindley, whose fake name echoes those of England’s Moors Murderers, to join him in a livestream her fans will find riveting because, as Hindley tells her, he’s actually Leopold Hutchins, the pickup who stabbed her mother 14 times when she failed to use her safe word. Skeptical? Hindley knows endless details about the killing that were never released by the police. If Poe won’t do the broadcast, Hindley threatens to harm everyone she loves: her father; her producer and lover, Kip Nguyen; and her black Lab, Bailey. And there’s one more complication that makes the pressure on Poe even more unbearable. Seven years ago, against all odds, she succeeded in tracking Leopold Hutchins from Burlington to New York and killing him herself. In fact, it’s that murder that Hindley most wants her to talk about. Which bully is more fearsome, the man who’s threatening her or the man she killed?
Better set aside several uninterrupted hours for this toxic rocket. You’ll be glad you did.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9781464226229
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
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