An engrossing yarn about innocence-turned-malignant, by turns hilarious and haunting.
Schoolkids are as devious and dangerous as they are cute in Kelly’s slyly unsettling suspenser.
Tina is a single mom with a checkered past (she barely remembers the drunken hookup that derailed her life and produced her 10-year-old son Matty) who has a toehold in affluent Park Slope, Brooklyn, thanks to a below-market rental and a teaching job at L’il Learners preschool. She loves her charges—vomiting and poop jokes notwithstanding—but wonders about Jonah, a 3-year-old who never talks or plays, especially when his attacks on a little girl escalate from biting and hair-pulling to stabbing with a tack and worse. Jonah’s older sister Darla, Matty’s classmate, is also a problem; her more sophisticated bullying of an overweight boy named Byron progresses to subtle, disturbing bloodshed. Tina sympathizes with Jonah and Darla because their mother Laura recently died in a hiking accident (they say they can see her ghost) and grows even more sympathetic when she meets their handsome, ingratiating father Patrick. As Tina grows closer to Patrick and his kids, she puts aside others’ misgivings even as red flags appear, including hints that Laura’s death might not have been accidental. Kelly’s novel is a mordantly funny portrait of high-end preschools full of well-heeled, judgmental moms and exasperating, antic children. It’s also a plangent reflection on the fragility of relationships—Tina’s decade-long friendship with her landlady Cheryl, whose daughter Naomi she practically raised, goes by the wayside when Cheryl decides she wants more rent. The author’s clever, evocative prose illuminates characters in their labyrinthine complexity—especially Darla’s arresting mix of childishness and dark calculation. (“Darla hates the fat boy so much she would like to bite him and swallow the pieces. She wants to call him fatty-pants again, but this time Naomi and Matty would hear….Darla knows better than to show her friends what she feels.”) From this bad seed sprouts a page-turner.
An engrossing yarn about innocence-turned-malignant, by turns hilarious and haunting.Pub Date: July 3, 2024
ISBN: 9798988721369
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Flexible Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
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
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