SOULMATES

Name: SOULMATES
Author: Jessica Grose
ISBN: 978-0-06-239157-5

by Jessica Grose ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2016

This book leaves readers wanting more than what they get—a dull he said, she said recap of a failed marriage, with a few...

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Editor and blogger Grose’s (Sad Desk Salad, 2012) second novel skewers yoga and guru culture, taking readers into the mysterious happenings at a secretive New Mexico cult.

When New York lawyer Dana Morrison sees her husband Ethan’s face on the cover of the New York Post, she hasn’t seen him in five years. It takes a moment for the headline to register: “Nama-Slay: Yoga Couple Found Dead in New Mexico Cave.” Needless to say, she’s not the other half of the yoga couple, though she’s technically still Ethan’s wife. This situation seems rife with dramatic potential, but the novel ultimately doesn’t make much of it. Dana’s sense of loyalty sends her straight to the place where Ethan died, determined to clear his name after an investigator raises the possibility that the deaths were a murder-suicide. Once she’s there, Ethan’s voice becomes part of the story thanks to a book he wrote explaining the failure of their marriage. His words alternate with Dana’s present-moment reactions to what he’s written. Late in the novel, one character says “Woo! That felt good. It can be good to retell your story. In the act of retelling, our bitterness becomes smaller and smaller, until it is the size of a flea, and we can flick it away.” Unfortunately, that kind of retelling and explaining doesn’t make for great fiction. Throughout, the prose lacks the imagery and action that bring stories and characters to life. Instead, it reads like an interminable phone call with a friend rehashing her breakup, which doesn’t leave readers pulling for the dead, disillusioned husband or the abandoned wife.

This book leaves readers wanting more than what they get—a dull he said, she said recap of a failed marriage, with a few satirical laughs along the way.

Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-06-239157-5

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 29, 2016

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016

Categories:

SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

- BOOK REVIEW
SCREAMING ON THE INSIDE
by Jessica Grose

- BOOK REVIEW
SAD DESK SALAD
by Jessica Grose

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A CONSPIRACY OF BONES

by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020

Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.

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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

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
EVIL BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE AND BONES
by Kathy Reichs

- BOOK REVIEW
COLD, COLD BONES
by Kathy Reichs

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ARTEMIS

by Andy Weir ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 14, 2017

One small step, no giant leaps.

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Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.

Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”

One small step, no giant leaps.