A moving and psychologically astute crime drama.
In this novel, a woman gets drawn into a criminal conspiracy by her wayward brother and must confront her family’s troubled past.
Cass Schmidt lives with her grandmother Tilly in the woods of Backus, Minnesota. Cass is haunted by twin sources of shame: her crushing poverty and her family’s ignominious past checkered with criminality. Her brother, Jack, shows up suddenly with a bag filled with money and buries it on Tilly’s property—he won’t divulge the details of the trouble he’s in, but Cass can only assume it’s deep. Then, Danny and Jesse, two of her cousins, the sons of her uncle George Bloom, a corrupt cop, show up. They are willing to resort to violence against her and Tilly to find the money and Jack. Cass learns that Jack stole the money from Harold Frost, a brutal drug dealer, but the details remain obscure. Her father, Vick, offers to help, but she hears rumors he might be in on the burglary, and he’s a reprobate criminal. In addition, he was a miserable father, and she suspects he might be responsible in some way for the death of her mother, Suzanne. Soukup deftly captures the desperation of Cass’ life, one that seems doomed from the start: “Her greatest fear had always been that she, too, would become another of the universe’s endless victims, not by misfortune, not by her own undoing, but by the sheer anonymity that is the universe’s might, this planet a belligerent rock hurled from its own apostatic hand, without impetus, without end.” His writing is gritty and authentic—the dialogue rings unerringly true—but it also achieves a poetic luminosity. Further, the taut tension that forms the narrative backbone of the plot never loosens for a moment. The author has composed a remarkable anatomy of a world caught in the grip of a vise—pulverized by the pressure of the past and a hopelessness about the future.
A moving and psychologically astute crime drama.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-925965-80-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
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
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.
Wyoming Game and Fish Warden Joe Pickett has been shot plenty of times before. But this time may be the last.
As Joe hovers between life and death in a Billings hospital, Box indicates that Dorn Peddy and James Dale O’Bryan are the two men who ambushed him, shot him, and left him for dead. But he doesn’t reveal who hired them or why. That’s left up to Joe’s three daughters: bird-abatement firm chief executive Sheridan, Bozeman private eye April, and University of Wyoming undergrad Lucy. Since the man who reported the incident to the Twelve Sleep County Sheriff’s Department has disappeared, the most that newly appointed Sheriff Steve Sondergard can do is to warn Sheridan and her sisters away from the case. But the fact that both the shooters and the witness seem to have come from one of exactly three places presents an obvious appeal to the younger Picketts, who plan to each visit one place and question the owners simultaneously before they can warn each other that anyone’s coming. The only problem is that all the possible suspects—billionaire Michael Thompson and his wife, Brandy, of the Double Diamond Ranch; ranchers John and Shelby Bucholz, of the Bucholz Cattle Company; and secretive sisters Lisa and Lainie McElwee, of McElwee Land and Cattle Ranch—act equally guilty. As Box unspools a series of flashbacks showing what Joe was up to in the weeks before the ambush, one question assumes paramount importance: Can Joe’s daughters identify which of them is behind the plot to murder their father before the hired gunmen visit the hospital and try again?
More than any of his earlier cases, the comatose hero’s 26th adventure bears the hallmarks of a formal detective story.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780593851098
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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