A shallow story about intrigue in the luxurious international art world.
A young painter who creates copies of masterpieces for the wealthy gets a mysterious new benefactor.
Emma Caan is a young artist with a real job in a world of fakes: She paints copies of the great masterpieces for wealthy collectors and museums to display so that the valuable originals can be safely hidden away. Still reeling from a family disaster, Emma has only one rule: She refuses to copy any paintings that involve fire. Still, she stays busy, though her job is a painful reminder of how her own painting has stalled. Then Russian oligarch Leonard Sobetsky singles her out and introduces her to the glamorous international art world. He sets her up with a new job at a gallery and a studio apartment, and soon she's traveling to Art Basel Hong Kong and partying late into the night with a variety of dubious figures, including her favorite Instagram influencer. But the question niggles: Is Leonard trying to accomplish something illegal with this generosity? The answer is obvious, though not to naïve Emma. But the biggest problem with this novel is its lack of urgency: It’s a thriller without thrills. The plot stumbles forward too slowly, overly concerned with relaying details about art parties and galleries, what it’s like to fly on a private jet and amass thousands of followers on social media. The luxury impresses Emma—who, as it turns out, is a fantastic saleswoman despite her lack of experience—but grows tedious to the reader, and the characters are a blur of similar qualities. Katz is trying to highlight their shallowness, but they’re so generic that telling them apart is almost impossible. Even the revelation of why fire terrifies Emma is anticlimactic; she never comes alive enough for us to care about her past or future.
A shallow story about intrigue in the luxurious international art world.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-308258-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.
A series of mounting complications leads to yet another fight to the death between the discarded intelligence agents of Slough House and the morally bankrupt head of MI5.
As Jackson Lamb’s motley crew on Aldersgate Street struggles to cope with the deaths of River Cartwright’s grandfather and mentor, intelligence veteran David Cartwright, and their dim, beloved colleague Min Harper, new troubles are brewing. Diana Taverner, who runs the British Intelligence Service from Regent’s Park, is being blackmailed by former MP Peter Judd to do his bidding. Nothing untoward about that, of course, but this time, Judd’s demands, backed by a compromising tape recording, are more pressing than usual. So Diana reconvenes the Brains Trust—Al Hawke, Avril Potts, Daisy Wessex, and their ex-boss Charles Cornell Stamoran—whose last assignment was to serve as the contact for psychopathic IRA informant Dougie Malone while turning a blind eye to his multiple rapes and murders, which were really none of the Crown’s business. Taverner’s new assignment for the Brains Trust is the assassination of Judd. Since all these developments are filtered through the riotously cynical lens of Herron’s imagination, nothing goes as planned, and when the smoke clears, the fatalities don’t include Judd. Now that Judd knows he has as much reason to fear Taverner as she does to fear him, Lamb offers to broker a peace meeting between them which Slough House computer geek Roddy Ho will keep secret by knocking out 37 security cameras around Taverner’s dwelling. What could possibly go wrong?
The best news of all: The climax leaves the door open to further reports from the hilariously misnamed British Intelligence.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2025
ISBN: 9781641297264
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Soho Crime
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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