A bold concept, poorly executed by this veteran thriller writer (Blown, 2005, etc.).
FDR recruits a young Jack Kennedy to do some sleuthing in Europe on the eve of World War II.
It’s early 1939. Jack is 21, overshadowed by older brother Joe and racked by an undiagnosed disease, but Roosevelt sees past all that because he intuits that Jack is a nonconformist and risk-taker. The president has decided to run for a third term. What concerns him is a German network steering money to Democratic clubhouses in hopes of electing an isolationist. Jack must find out how it operates; as son of the ambassador to London, he will have all the access he needs. The premise is different enough from Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America to be workable, and Mathews has carefully researched the period, but her portrait of Jack comes up short. She captures the charming ladies’ man, the romantic hero indifferent to death, but there’s little sign of his questing intelligence; Jack’s initial reason for traveling is to research his Harvard senior thesis (eventually his first book, Why England Slept). His fellow travelers on the trans-Atlantic crossing include Diana Playfair, an English femme fatale and Fascist sympathizer, and the White Spider, a psychopathic killer working for Gestapo chief Heydrich. We’ve already seen the Spider knife to death his first two victims, a sign that melodramatic cheap thrills will trump geopolitical intrigue. Jack will fall big time for Diana as they crisscross Europe. They will make furious love, but can she be trusted, especially after Heydrich snaps her up? Jack sends Morse code messages to FDR. He’ll be in plenty of tight spots, though there’s usually backup, and he gets to use his Luger. What hurts Jack most is his discovery that his dad is one of the network’s secret donors; their confrontation gets physical.
A bold concept, poorly executed by this veteran thriller writer (Blown, 2005, etc.).Pub Date: July 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59448-719-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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