This has the potential to be a thoughtful thriller with an interesting setting, but Barton is too willing to cater to...
When two girls traveling in Thailand turn up dead in a suspicious fire, journalist Kate Waters follows the story without disclosing a hidden agenda.
Kate's son, a former golden boy, dropped out of school and traveled to Thailand two years prior, and he’s been in sporadic touch since. Coincidentally, it turns out that he was present at the same guesthouse on the night the girls died. Sidelined because of her conflict of interest, Kate continues to investigate, as does DI Bob Sparkes, a compassionate policeman distracted by the impending death of his wife. Which leads one to wonder: When did all thriller writers begin to fashion themselves as psychologists? There’s a dead giveaway to any possible plot twist—a character whose face or eyes is described as “blank.” In Barton’s (The Child, 2017, etc.) book, to be fair, it takes almost 300 pages to reach this moment, and up until that point, she creates quite a bit of narrative interest by giving voice to the victims in addition to the many people involved in the investigation—driven reporters, bereaved parents, and very human policemen. But once the killer is clearly outed, even though it takes another 100 pages for all the pieces to fall into place, the novel quickly loses steam. Even a final moral conundrum that should immediately freeze the blood of any parent seems overly constructed rather than shocking. By that point, it had become tiresome reading about most of the characters and their shifty relationships to the truth. “No one is to be believed ever,” seems to be a major takeaway. Oh, and P.S., don’t let your kids run wild in Thailand.
This has the potential to be a thoughtful thriller with an interesting setting, but Barton is too willing to cater to expectations—short chapters, familiar clues, and stereotypical villains.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-101-99051-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
The two sisters who write as Constantine (The Last Mrs. Parrish, 2017) can do better than this.
"Baltimore Heiress Bludgeoned to Death in Her Home"—and now the killer is after the dead woman's daughter.
"Only days ago, Kate had been mulling over what to get her mother for Christmas. She couldn't have known that instead of choosing a gift, she'd be picking out her casket." Unfortunately, things are about to get much worse. Immediately after the funeral, Kate receives a text. "You think you're sad now, just wait. By the time I’m finished with you, you'll wish you had been buried today." That same night, she finds three mice in her bathroom sink with their eyes gouged out, accompanied by another alarming message. "They all ran after a charming life / he took their eyes with a carving knife / Did you ever see such a beautiful sight / As three dead mice." Kate and her semi-estranged husband, Simon, hire round-the-clock security guards, since one thing these people have is plenty of money. Also Ivy League degrees, designer clothes, a nanny, a cook, a beach house, a foundation, and big, successful careers. Simon is an architect, and Kate is a pediatric cardiothoracic surgeon, or at least she's supposed to be—there's not a single detail that makes this feel believable, unless "she’d worked her butt off to get into med school and to ace the MCATs" counts. Maybe complaints about the money-porn aspect of the book seem picky, but the whodunit aspect, which is where it lives or dies, is not much more substantial. Suspicious details pile up so quickly against the various suspects that one never actually suspects them, and then so much backstory has to be shoehorned in at the last minute to support the solution to the puzzle that it's not very satisfying.
The two sisters who write as Constantine (The Last Mrs. Parrish, 2017) can do better than this.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-286881-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Grade-A Connelly. The dark forces arrayed against the hero turn out to be disappointingly toothless, but everything else...
Harry Bosch, balancing a new pair of gigs in greater LA, tackles two cases, one of them official, one he struggles to keep as private as can be.
Now that he’s settled the lawsuit he brought against the LAPD for having forced him into retirement, Harry (The Crossing, 2015, etc.) is working as an unsalaried, part-time reservist for the San Fernando Police Department while keeping his license as a private investigator. Just as the San Fernando force is decimated by the layoffs that made Harry such an attractive hire, it’s confronted with a serious menace: the Screen Cutter, a serial rapist with a bizarre penchant for assaulting women during the most fertile days of their menstrual cycles. Ordinarily Harry would jump at the chance to join officers Bella Lourdes and Danny Sisto in tracking down the Screen Cutter, and he does offer one or two promising suggestions. But he’s much more intent on the private job he’s taken for 85-year-old engineering czar Whitney Vance, who wants him to find Vibiana Duarte, the Mexican girl he impregnated when he was a USC student, and her child, who’d be well past middle age by now—and also wants him to keep his inquiries absolutely secret. Harry’s admirably dogged sleuthing soon reveals what became of Vibiana and her child, but his discovery is less interesting and challenging than his attempts to report back to his client, who doesn’t answer his private phone even as everyone around Harry is demanding information about the case he doesn’t feel he can share.
Grade-A Connelly. The dark forces arrayed against the hero turn out to be disappointingly toothless, but everything else clicks in this latest chapter of a compulsively good cop’s odyssey through the City of Angels and its outlying neighborhoods and less angelic spirits.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-22594-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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