A subdued but positively absorbing murder mystery.
In Williams’ debut thriller, a man plots to evade taxes by cheating a casino—a scheme that goes horribly wrong when someone ends up dead.
Millionaire businessman Burt Donaldson doesn’t like that the U.S. government takes nearly 40 percent of his yearly earnings, so he hatches a plot to trim the taxes he owes. He plans to fix a game of roulette at his Vegas casino: he’ll let a gambler win millions but afterward have the bulk of the winnings returned to himself. A few of Burt’s execs pick Aussie employee Jason Chard to play the lucky winner, as his memorization is solid—Burt makes sure to test his skills—and he and wife Debbie could duck away to their home country with their portion of the cash; Burt would then pick up his portion from Jason. The ruse works, but it seems that, weeks later in Australia, Jason is reluctant to part with any of the score. Burt travels to Australia to track down Jason but gets more than he bargained for—a murder rap to beat. Williams’ novel often reads like a soap opera, a thoroughly enjoyable one, with murder, mystery, sexual tension, and a double cross or two. Burt opens the story as the protagonist, but there’s also sufficient coverage of Jason while the roulette scheme is underway and of John Fix, vice president of administration, whose romance with assistant lawyer Jane Coe is tested when an envious John questions her frequent business meetings with Burt. For details, Williams is meticulous, which typically works in the novel’s favor, especially with regard to the laborious process of choosing the gambler: John, marketing VP Peter Rush, and attorney Bill Smythe take their time for the selection, which helps build suspense and exposes each man’s doubts about their boss’s plans. All of these plot points likewise lead to a big payoff at the end, and the novel caps off with a nice, effective twist. The excessive particulars, however, can sometimes be a bit much. For example, as Burt explains the scam to Jason at dinner, Jason eyes his meal and allows the narrative to turn into a superfluous lesson on how to eat French onion soup. Eventually, though, once Burt reaches Australia, the plot becomes wittily convoluted in a mystery that zigzags with glee.
A subdued but positively absorbing murder mystery.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491749081
Page Count: 272
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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