Celebrity, addiction, money and deception collide in this exciting debut mystery.
Derailed by addiction, a writer gets the chance to redeem herself in this suspenseful Hollywood thriller.
Brett Tanager had it all. A reporter who became a successful television showrunner with her very first idea, Brett lived with her gorgeous boyfriend and had a wonderful relationship with his daughter, Julia. Brett had just one problem: She couldn’t write without alcohol and drugs. Late one night, after a trip to her dealer, she killed a woman in a hit-and-run. Gould’s debut novel really begins years after Brett’s accident. Having lost everything, she’s now house-sitting in present-day Malibu. She’s standing at the water’s edge, contemplating suicide, when Julia appears. Brett resists the urge to drink while Julia describes how her best friend, Caleigh, the daughter of the Hollywood big shot who produced Brett’s show, has disappeared. Despite her immense wealth, Caleigh was involved in “enjo kosai,” a Japanese variant of prostitution in which older men pay teenage girls large amounts of money for sex. Julia is convinced that, since the show Brett wrote was a police procedural, Brett will be able to find Caleigh. Brett knows she’s not capable of finding anything other than the bottom of a bottle of Glenfiddich, but she goes to find a private investigator’s phone number for Julia. When Brett returns, Julia has vanished. Her disappearance prompts Brett to re-engage with her old Hollywood life—and even start to get clean—to save Julia. But will Brett’s efforts to pull her life together be too little, too late? And will she ever confess to her own crime? A television writer herself, Gould clearly knows Brett’s milieu. Most characters seem plucked from US Weekly: Brad and Angelina copycats Campbell McCauley and Rosalie Bennett; “Internet gossip maven” Jason Ratt; and Nic Ripetti, “go-to investigator for the stars.” The locations are similarly realistic, whether Brett is enduring an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting a few blocks from the beach or making her way through a Hollywood funeral-turned–networking session. Occasionally, an inauthentic or clichéd phrase slows the novel’s forward momentum, as when Brett observes that a doctor’s “brown eyes glinted like jewels offset by clear white,” or when Brett’s desire rises “like embers catching fire.” But those clunky moments are only minor road bumps in Brett’s frenetic, entertaining ride.
Celebrity, addiction, money and deception collide in this exciting debut mystery.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0988931244
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Gibraltar Road
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.
Ware (In A Dark, Dark Wood, 2015) offers up a classic “paranoid woman” story with a modern twist in this tense, claustrophobic mystery.
Days before departing on a luxury cruise for work, travel journalist Lo Blacklock is the victim of a break-in. Though unharmed, she ends up locked in her own room for several hours before escaping; as a result, she is unable to sleep. By the time she comes onboard the Aurora, Lo is suffering from severe sleep deprivation and possibly even PTSD, so when she hears a big splash from the cabin next door in the middle of the night, “the kind of splash made by a body hitting water,” she can’t prove to security that anything violent has actually occurred. To make matters stranger, there's no record of any passenger traveling in the cabin next to Lo’s, even though Lo herself saw a woman there and even borrowed makeup from her before the first night’s dinner party. Reeling from her own trauma, and faced with proof that she may have been hallucinating, Lo continues to investigate, aided by her ex-boyfriend Ben (who's also writing about the cruise), fighting desperately to find any shred of evidence that she may be right. The cast of characters, their conversations, and the luxurious but confining setting all echo classic Agatha Christie; in fact, the structure of the mystery itself is an old one: a woman insists murder has occurred, everyone else says she’s crazy. But Lo is no wallflower; she is a strong and determined modern heroine who refuses to doubt the evidence of her own instincts. Despite this successful formula, and a whole lot of slowly unraveling tension, the end is somehow unsatisfying. And the newspaper and social media inserts add little depth.
Too much drama at the end detracts from a finely wrought and subtle conundrum.Pub Date: July 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3293-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scout Press/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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