Layers and layers of unlovely revelations about people who seemed perfectly nice.
The disappearance of a well-liked pensioner places all the other problems of the aspiring resort town of Ebbing in an unsettling new context.
Charlie Perry, whose ex-model wife, Pauline, talked him into buying the money pit Tall Trees, is worried because his expenses have left him deeply in debt to Wadham Manor, the posh care home where his daughter, Birdie Nightingale, has been housed ever since a botched burglary left her boyfriend dead and her blind and brain-damaged. Housecleaner Dee Eastwood is grieving the loss of her elder brother, Phil Golding, who was found dead in a park three weeks ago. Dave Harman, landlord of the Neptune pub, is angry that newcomer Pete Diamond is sponsoring a music festival that will bring all manner of riffraff into the quiet town. DI Elise King, still on sick leave after her cancer surgery, wonders when she’ll feel herself again. All these troubles get shunted aside when Pauline reports that Charlie’s gone missing. By the time Elise finds him dead, she’s already accepted retired librarian Ronnie Durrant’s invitation to poke around a little. Given what Elise has already discovered, it makes perfect sense for DCI Graham McBride to call her back to the Major Crime Team ahead of schedule and to appoint her senior investigating officer when DI Hugh Ward, the long-term live-in who dumped her, goes on sick leave after he’s dumped in turn by his fiancee. Barton presents such an embarrassment of riches that the tale has almost run its course before the coppers have a chance to sit down with Stuart Bennett, the just-freed burglar who attacked Birdie.
Layers and layers of unlovely revelations about people who seemed perfectly nice.Pub Date: June 14, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-98480-304-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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