Adventurously macabre and fun.
A hospice nurse confronts horrors after relocating to a high-tech housing complex with deadly secrets in Barron’s thriller.
There is a massive housing project underway, stretching some 170 kilometers through Saudi Arabia’s Neom region, called “The Line.” The totally enclosed glass and steel structure is popularly described as a skyscraper knocked over on its side. In this novel, the author reimagines The Line as a corporate-sponsored, urban-futurist enclave running through the Mojave Desert; the inhabitants have nicknamed it “The Silver Castle.” Melanie (Mel) Sanger, 42, is just moving in after fleeing the heartbreak she left behind in Los Angeles. She meets a man named Celwyn in transit who takes an immediate liking to her—but in the state that she’s in, Mel isn’t interested in giving him the time of day. The menace inherent in the narrative is apparent from the start: Idrissia, the corporate overlord running the sleekly clean, convenient, key-coded digs, just exudes alarming dystopian vibes. Even more alarmingly, it transpires that Mel’s would-be paramour Celwyn isn’t actually the lawyer he originally claims to be—he’s really a Knight of the Holy Order of Carpathia, devoted to hunting down vampires. Mel learns there is a whole mess of the undead creatures about to descend upon the unwitting residents of the Castle. It’s a good thing that, in addition to being a lionhearted hospice nurse, Mel is immune to vampire bites. It all makes for bloody good fun: “He spun the blade in a downward arc, and a second later the bloody severed head of the vampire lay on the floor of Saul’s room next to her still-twitching body,” the author writes with gleeful abandon, finding creative ways to put his own spin on traditional vampire lore. It’s been a while since a protagonist has kicked as much Nosferatu butt as Buffy the Vampire Slayer; happily, it looks like Mel’s vamp-hunting career is just getting started.
Adventurously macabre and fun.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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