A complicated plot, richly drawn characters, and a vein of horror will keep readers devouring the pages.
Private detective Charlie Parker faces a pair of otherworldly foes in a crime novel packed with colorful characters.
In the Maine woods, rain exposes the body of a woman buried in a shallow grave. An autopsy reveals she had given birth a day or two before her death, but whether she was murdered or not is unclear. There is no sign of the child’s body, and a Star of David has been carved on a nearby tree. Meanwhile, 5-year-old Daniel Weaver lives with his mother, Holly—she is “blond,” he is “ebony.” She tells him a story of The Woman in the Woods, “spirited away by an ogre.” Daniel’s toy phone rings throughout the book, and he hears the voice of a strange woman. And in Cadillac, Indiana, an Englishman named Quayle inquires about a pregnant “mongrel [bitch]” named Karis Lamb who had passed through town. Quayle, who might be “the devil himself,” has one purpose on Earth: “to locate a single book, and enable it to do its work.” It’s the Fractured Atlas, which he expects will change the world, replacing the “Old God” with “Not-Gods.” Not knowing Karis’ fate, he tracks down and kills those protecting her because she may know the book’s whereabouts. His delightfully disgusting companion, Pallida Mors, has “the skin of a drowning victim, and the eyes of a doll.” Attorney Moxie Castin, who calls himself "Jewish-ish," hires private detective Parker to find Karis' child, "because I want to believe that child is alive." But Parker faces frightful foes. Every character is expertly drawn—Parker’s friends Louis and Angel are a pair of gay criminals, and Louis, who is black, blows up a Chevy truck that was flying Confederate flags. The owner, Billy Ocean, learned from his daddy not to use racial slurs, but he really hates “Negroes.” Quayle hates everybody, and his racism is just a part of his overall rottenness. There’s also a group of rich people called the Backers, who ages ago sold out to dark, arcane forces. Some of them think Parker is “partly divine” because he’s survived so many attacks.
A complicated plot, richly drawn characters, and a vein of horror will keep readers devouring the pages.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7192-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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