Not scary enough to distract from the wacky science.
Cute little stolen gypsy kids hold the balance of power as a Russian supermom plans to poison several ecosystems.
Opening with the sack of Delphi by Romans unhappy with the latest oracular projections, Rollins (The Judas Strain, 2007, etc.) pauses briefly in the mid-century communist Romanian Carpathians where Russians, led by a very tough dame, stage a brutal attack on an isolated gypsy village. He next plunges us into present-day Washington, D.C., where a derelict scientist takes a sniper’s bullet in his back and falls into the arms of Sigma Force strongman Gray Pierce just outside the Smithsonian castle. Gray, who had taken the old guy to be a homeless vet, is surprised to be slipped an ancient Greek coin by the dying man who, upon examination in Sigma’s handy lab deep under the Smithsonian castle, is revealed to have been a professor. The corpse is highly radioactive. Gray and his team, mourning the recent death of their resourceful one-armed colleague Monk Bryant, are plunged into solving the murder, which was the work of one of the Russians from that Carpathian massacre, now a grandfatherly scientist who has in tow Sasha, a little gypsy girl sporting a surgical steel implant that sets off seeming psychic superpowers. She’s one of a crop of children bred from a strain of savants swept up in that Romanian raid. The experiments with the kids continued after the Soviet collapse thanks to an influx of capitalist cash, so once agent Gray starts following clues, he finds that he and his team are in danger not only from evil Russians but from evil Americans. Meanwhile, in radioactive Ukraine, Monk Bryant, not at all dead, wakes from an amnesiac coma to answer a plea for help from a swarm of kids and a kindly chimp with cranial implants just like the one he now sports. It all has to do with a plot to restore Russia to its rightful place.
Not scary enough to distract from the wacky science.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-123094-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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