Such a shame that all those women died to so little effect. Pass the salt.
It looks as if the Bayside Strangler is back in business—and his nefarious designs are by no means limited to strangling.
Fifteen years ago, San Diego PD Detectives Todd Williams and Paula Chase’s search for Alyssa Morgan, a paraplegic single mother who’d gone missing, ended with the discovery of her hanging in Tecolote National Park. As it turned out, Alyssa would be the second of five young women the Bayside Strangler had killed before mysteriously stopping his work. Now Chloe and Sloane Morgan, the two daughters who’d dedicated their lives to finding out who made them orphans, have vanished as well. There’s no way that Kendra Michaels, a music therapist who was once blind and is now hypersensitive, will walk away from an appeal to join the hunt for them. The road to answers is strewn with both obstacles and distractions, from Kendra’s continuing romantic pursuit by freelance negotiator Adam Lynch to the murder of Paula Chase, whose retirement doesn’t keep her safe from an intruder looking for clues the Morgan sisters have dug up, to the return of the strangler, who seems determined to outdo his earlier tally in the present day. The authors reveal the killer’s identity early on, link his criminal enterprise to the shadowy Dayton Group—which has attracted the attention of the former attorney general in Washington—and give him a personal vendetta against Kendra. None of this imparts the slightest heft or urgency to this generic serial-killer-with-highly-placed-government-connections saga.
Such a shame that all those women died to so little effect. Pass the salt.Pub Date: June 25, 2024
ISBN: 9781538726266
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2024
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.
Character assassination reigns supreme, if not uncontested, in a Long Island suburb.
April Masterson loves her husband, corporate attorney Elliott; their 7-year-old, Bobby; and her YouTube channel, “April’s Sweet Secrets.” What she doesn’t love is whoever’s texting her warnings about how Bobby isn’t really in their backyard while she’s busy filming her videos or withering critiques of her baking show or veiled accusations about her past and threats about her present. Her best friend, former prosecutor Julie Bressler, may be bossy and opinionated, but surely she’d never turn on April this way. Who else might know enough to send April goodies like a picture of her kissing Mark Tanner, Bobby’s soccer coach? Though April struggles to get Elliot to take her ordeal seriously, even when she shows up at his office for a lunch date, he’s protected by his receptionist, Brianna Anderson, whose attachment to her boss goes far beyond loyalty. Then Julie turns on her; Maria Cooper, her friendly new next-door neighbor, turns on her; and in the most mind-boggling scene, Doris Kirkland, April’s mother, whose dementia has brought her to a nursing home, turns on her. McFadden releases an escalating series of toxins so deftly into the suburban atmosphere that it’s practically an anticlimax when someone gets killed and April instantly becomes the prime suspect. But that’s only a setup for the tale’s boldest move: switching its narrator from April to a fair-weather friend who frames the whole nightmare in dramatically different terms. As a special gift to her savviest fans, the author throws in an even more jolting epilogue that’s as hard to forget as it is to believe.
Recommended reading for every paranoid suburbanite who’s considering a move to the city, or to the Arctic wilds.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249600
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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
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