Solid thriller, intriguing setting: Johansen’s back on track.
Eve Duncan (Body of Lies, etc.), forensic sculptor, on the trail of an international serial killer this time.
Mark Trevor, one of Scotland Yard’s finest, contacts Eve and her true love, Atlanta police detective Joe Quinn. Why? Someone is meticulously ripping the faces off living women and then killing them. Trevor warns Eve that her foster daughter, 17-year-old Jane MacGuire, could be next. But why? Eve discovers the answer when she reconstructs the facial features of a recent victim’s skull—and finds that the dead woman is a dead-ringer for Jane. After a briefing on the strange ritual killings—volcanic ash was found near each mutilated body—Eve, Jane, and Joe (and sexy Trevor, of course) head to Italy and an archeological dig in Herculaneum. Seems that a former worker on the site, Guido Manza, was obsessed (to the point of neglecting Aldo, his mentally unstable son) with Cira, a beautiful courtesan of ancient Herculaneum whose ravishing likeness was preserved on a villa wall. She still has the power to drive men mad after thousands of years. Guido found and hid the box of gold that Cira’s noble lover gave her, but the explosion he rigged to cover his misdeeds killed him. Somewhere along the line, Aldo became a full-blown psychotic, working out rage over his childhood mistreatment by finding—and killing—modern women who look like Cira. Will Trevor keep his hands off nubile Jane? Yes . . . for now. (A sequel is in the works.) Will Eve step back and let Jane into the spotlight? Yes. Plagued by dreams of Cira’s death in the long-ago volcanic explosion that buried Herculaneum and Pompeii, Jane seems to be conveniently psychic, a favorite plot device of this megaselling author. Nonetheless, Johansen breathes new life into tired themes by bringing supporting characters front and center, and the preposterous storylines and lazy writing of her last titles (Firestorm, 2003, etc.) are nowhere to be seen.
Solid thriller, intriguing setting: Johansen’s back on track.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2004
ISBN: 0-553-80341-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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