A feckless narrative only partially redeemed by richly textured writing.
Teens working on a building project come under the malign influence of an Oklahoma moonshiner in Sadi’s suspense thriller.
The narrative unfolds over a summer in the late 1950s at a campground near the town of Council, Oklahoma, where 10 teenage boys and girls from a church group, chaperoned by a married couple, gather to build a meetinghouse for the Indigenous Kickapoo tribe. The kids have a surprisingly good time digging foundations and mortaring cement blocks, their tasks punctuated by hearty meals, games of dodgeball, and furtive moments listening to forbidden rock ’n’ roll on the radio. A love triangle takes shape that finds North Carolina spitfire Lulumae Johnson taking a liking to brooding New Yorker Ranen Sarensen and cooling toward her boyfriend, Lee Ray, who bombs around in his mufflerless black car, smoking and defiantly blaring rocking tunes from the radio. Lee gravitates toward John MacGrath, a wizened, bowlegged old man who operates a still at his farm, where he plies Lee with corn whisky. A World War I vet who did a stint in a mental hospital, MacGrath has an air of eerie religiosity that is heightened by the burning bush visible in the depths of his blue-gray eyes. Looking on anxiously is Barron Henderson, a local Kickapoo man who suspects that MacGrath means to rope Lee into his cultlike craziness. This yarn features sharply etched characters, punchy dialogue (“Why, ain’t he the cutest, littlest ole man you ever did see” sasses Lulumae), and evocative, Midwestern-gothic atmospherics (“She looked at the childlike figure of John MacGrath moving the rocking chair back and forth on the porch floor in a slow, even way…and suddenly saw the thin, grimy looking hand striking and snatching out at the fly buzzing in front of his sunken, toothless mouth”). Unfortunately, MacGrath feels more eccentric than scary, and the listless, haphazard plot never satisfyingly pays off the sense of occult menace that Sadi conjures around him.
A feckless narrative only partially redeemed by richly textured writing.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2001
ISBN: 9780595203130
Page Count: 202
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2023
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
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.
The latest Patterson co-write dramatizes unproven rumors that Adolf Hitler shot and killed his 23-year-old half niece, Geli Raubal, in Munich in 1931 in a fit of jealousy.
As with other young women in his past, Hitler essentially kept Raubal captive and forced her to participate in perverse sexual rituals with him. The murder occurs after she tells him she’s leaving Munich for Vienna to be with a man she intends to marry. (Fictional) police detective Thomas Bauer, a war hero whose wife and children are Jewish, risks his life over and over to nail Hitler for the crime (which is ruled a suicide) as the fascist state evolves and concentration camp horrors unfold. Periodically, the action shifts to the present, when in brief superfluous scenes an American professor, Eleanor Robbins, is mysteriously targeted for her efforts to obtain films of Hitler’s final moments with Raubal. The portrayal of Hitler is so caricatured that he casts a thin shadow here—as do the evil trio of Goebbels, Himmler, and Göring—depriving the story of urgency. The authors are more comfortable offsetting sobering, dutifully rolled out facts about Hitler’s rise and fall with breezy entertainment. Bauer, a master of the wisecrack, teams up with a young former intelligence officer in buddy-movie fashion. In one of this overlong novel’s best scenes, Raubal—the subject of much better novels, including Ron Hansen’s Hitler’s Niece (1999)—goes to a nightclub with Hitler; once there, he nudges her into showing off her vocal skills, only to have her ruffle his insecurities by stealing attention. In the end, Robbins pronounces, “Everything that happened…could have been prevented, if honest people had been allowed to simply do their jobs.” Fat chance of that.
A novel that’s lacking both as fiction and history.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2026
ISBN: 9780316404099
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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