A deeply funny novel, artfully composed.
An American psychiatric patient who believes he is a British spy flies to London to save the woman he loves from an evil Russian oligarch in Orkin’s comic thriller.
In the fifth installment of this series, the author returns to the strange but hilarious plight of James Flynn, a patient at a psychiatric institution in Los Angeles. He suffers from delusion—despite growing up in Burbank, California, he believes he is a British agent in His Majesty’s Secret Service and that the hospital that houses him is really a clandestine redoubt providing him with a cover. Despite the inarguable insanity of these beliefs, he is an inexplicably talented man who has in fact become famous for saving the world repeatedly, making him a delightfully complicated hero, drawn with great comic effect. When Caitlyn Valentine (a CIA agent with whom he enjoyed a romantic connection) stops returning his phone calls, he assumes she’s in grave danger and tracks her down to London, accompanied by his psychiatric nurse (aptly named Sancho). He finds Caitlyn posing as a bodyguard for Oleg Ivanov, a nefarious Russian billionaire who owns a lab devoted to creating dangerous computer viruses and who plans to take over the world. This volume in the series is more prone to slapstick humor than its predecessors, as in this exchange between James and Sancho in which James complains about traffic rules in London: “‘Driving on the left feels rather wrong.’ ‘Yeah, but it’s right.’ ‘Right?’ Flynn started to veer. ‘No! Left! Left!’” The inventive premise of the series has lost some of its novelty, and, as a consequence, some of its comic sparkle. Still, James remains a memorable protagonist, one whose principal strength as a faux secret agent might be his mental health issues, which make him profoundly unpredictable. Despite lacking some of the luster of the earlier entries in the series, this stands as an endlessly entertaining novel.
A deeply funny novel, artfully composed.Pub Date: July 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781685134457
Page Count: 312
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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