Improbable, sure, and complicated enough to try the reader’s patience at points. Still, as we’ve come to expect from...
Planet of the Apes meets Rocky—or maybe The Big Bang Theory.
Who knew that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the government think tank, had its own elite military force, as if Big Bang's Dr. Sheldon Cooper were adept with an Uzi? That’s the conceit behind Rollins’ (The Sixth Extinction, 2014, etc.) pulse-quickening Sigma Force series, though his nerds, “former Special Forces soldiers who had been retrained in various scientific disciplines,” are tough guys one and all, even the women. And, oh, the women: James Bond himself would blush at the sight of an extra-perceptive assassin, her perspicacity “honed from her years as an assassin for hire,” shedding a towel for queen and country—or maybe for party and politburo. Rollins commences from the straight-from-the-headlines notion that Neanderthals mated with some other hominid type to produce extra-bright kids, the “hybrid vigor” that evolutionary biologists lecture about. Locate some bones, throw religion into the mix, and you have a doctrine-shaking new view of Adam and Eve. Throw in Athanasius Kircher, the great 17th-century Jesuit scholar so beloved of Umberto Eco, and you’ve got your Da Vinci Code–ish intellectual backdrop. Throw Chinese mad scientists, spies and counterspies, and monkeys and half-monkeys—half-monkeys?—into the narrative Cuisinart, and you’ve gone maybe a thread too far in a complex storyline. But let Rollins describe just one subthread: “The plan had been to kidnap her from Leipzig before she left Germany. With both sisters in hand, she could have leveraged the one against the other to gain their respective cooperation. Furthermore, that lapse in intelligence required accelerating their plans to raid the U.S. primate lab.” Got all that? If it’s conjuring visions of Jay and Silent Bob instead of Sly Stallone, then no worries: it gets more hairy-chested as it goes along, and not least because supersmart silverbacks and human hybrids come to figure in the yarn.
Improbable, sure, and complicated enough to try the reader’s patience at points. Still, as we’ve come to expect from Rollins, an altogether satisfying techno-thriller.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238164-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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