The criminal mastermind manages to be both repellent and uninteresting, and it’s hard to root for anyone, including Sam,...
Nothing in Sam Capra’s three short years in the CIA could have prepared him for the series of high-stakes conspiracies he’s encountered since then (The Last Minute, 2012, etc.), including this tale of a ruthless Mephisto who promises to fulfill his minions’ dreams if only they’ll kill at his command.
Since getting forced out of the CIA, Sam Capra, 26, has opened dozens of bars around the world. So it’s actually statistically likely that he’d be sitting in one of them, San Francisco’s The Select, when a pair of strangers tries to kill a young woman before his eyes. Ever chivalrous, Sam comes to Diana Keene’s aid, and by the end of the episode, Grigori Rostov is dead and Glenn Marchbanks seriously wounded. Diana’s troubles spring from those of her mother, whose successful public relations firm is founded on a fateful deal she cut with John Belias, a modern-day Prince of Darkness. For a price to be named later, Belias arranges through his network of intermediaries for the failure of his associates’ business rivals. In Janice Keene’s case, the current price is the assassination of three well-known figures in Portland, Las Vegas and Chicago. Though her oncologist has already pronounced her death sentence, Janice soldiers on in the fatuous hope of leaving her daughter a better life. Diana begins to make inquiries that bring her to the attention of Belias’ other assassins. And this is just for starters. There’ll be many more betrayals, double crosses, noble/dumb sacrificial gestures, orders from A to B to eliminate C, false suspicions that specific killers have killed people that they don’t happen to have killed and, the most original feature here, violent deaths of people readers thought were keepers.
The criminal mastermind manages to be both repellent and uninteresting, and it’s hard to root for anyone, including Sam, when everyone’s basically under compulsion to eliminate everyone else. Maybe Abbott and his hapless hero should move on to a new formula.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2843-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
