A thoroughly researched and soberly told tale of one of today’s most pressing global issues, weakened by clumsy...
A terrorist plot threatens a high-profile event in the latest installment of a Milan-based thriller series.
When a hapless customs official accepts several bribes to overlook particular shipments coming through the Italian port of La Spezia, his guilt and suspicion compel him to confess the transgression to his brother-in-law, Gianni D’Imporzano, an agent with the Milanese Questura. What the subsequent probe turns up is frightening: someone has been transporting into Italy chemicals used to make the deadly gas sarin. The Questura assembles a team to foil the suspected terrorist scheme. The story proceeds to plumb painstaking investigative minutiae as inspectors track phone records, stake out suspects, and navigate agency politics, all while trying to lead normal lives. A parallel narrative describes how the villain, at first a normal Muslim-Italian man with Pakistani heritage, came to be radicalized, a slow build of humiliation, resentment, and cultural intolerance that culminates in his plan to commit mass murder. The mundane element of the tale is notable: would-be jihadis struggle with their sexual drives and the jobs they hate while detectives gush about meeting celebrities and bicker like siblings. Nobody is ideologically pure; everyone is merely human. Unfortunately, Erickson’s (Weekend Guest, 2016, etc.) attention to quotidian concerns tends to trip up the pace of his slick procedural. Every character, no matter how peripheral, is given a bio at the moment of introduction, and with the exception of the villain, whose past traces effectively to his harrowing present, the broader back stories of the main players have no bearing on the tale’s primary action. The result is that histories intended to round out characters read as mere devices for making them sympathetic instead of contributing to a textured fictional reality in which their participation in the plot leads to growth that they wouldn’t otherwise have achieved. This disjointedness drains the story of its urgency, leaving the reader to root for the foiling of terrorism for its own sake, without much concern for the agents trying to get the job done.
A thoroughly researched and soberly told tale of one of today’s most pressing global issues, weakened by clumsy characterization.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-941397-11-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: RedBrick Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2017
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
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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