If only the clever ending were worth the trouble it takes to get there.
On his deathbed, a famous mystery novelist invites a knowledgeable fan to come write his life story.
After a long career of bestsellers, Sebastian Trapp hasn't produced a book in decades, since his wife and son disappeared under mysterious circumstance following a New Year's Eve party. Twenty years later, with three months to live, he has one tale left to tell: the story of his life, which may or may not include answers to the questions surrounding the disappearances—for which many believe he is responsible. Nicky Hunter, an expert in detective fiction and a longtime correspondent of Trapp's, is his appointed amanuensis; she takes on the task with relish only slightly diluted by concern for her own longevity. Trapp's current San Francisco household consists of his erstwhile assistant and now second wife, Diana; his adult daughter, Madeleine (a failure-to-launch whose point of view alternates with Nicky's); and the latest edition of a French bulldog named Watson, whose many taxidermic predecessors are lined up in Nicky's assigned bedroom. There's also Sebastian's brutish nephew, his British buddy, his widowed mother (his brother also died mysteriously around the same time as the other two), a couple of colorful cops, and a corpse in the koi pond that is revealed on page 1 but not found until halfway through, clearly intended to goose the page-turning. If you enjoyed Woman in the Window (2018), be warned that this novel is its opposite. While the debut had truly breathtaking forward momentum but a somewhat ludicrous solution, this time we have an unbelievably leisurely build during which we pursue patent red herrings, read a lot about the weather and geography of San Francisco, and are hopefully impressed by quotes and references to Christie, Chandler, Hammett, etc. "The past isn't gone: It's just waiting," a catchphrase of Trapp's, is certainly the case. Unfortunately it waits too long.
If only the clever ending were worth the trouble it takes to get there.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2024
ISBN: 9780062678454
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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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