Tepid and vague.
Less-than-rip-roaring final installment in Twelve Hawks’ Fourth Realm trilogy (The Traveler, 2005, etc.).
Brothers Gabriel and Michael are Travelers, mystics who have the ability to journey between parallel dimensions, or realms. They find themselves aligned with opposite sides in the conflict between the Brethren, a shadowy group bent on acquiring and maintaining power, and those who work to thwart the Brethren's nefarious plan to establish a global surveillance network known as the Panopticon, designed to squash any and all efforts at resistance. Michael, the brother who works for the bad guys, is given a lesson in Machiavellian tactics by the Half Gods, a group of technologically advanced beings who have established Orwellian control over the Fifth Realm, and he returns to our dimension to consolidate his power. Meanwhile, gentle Gabriel travels to the hellish First Realm to rescue his beloved Maya, a member of the Harlequin warrior sect, dour fighters dedicated to protecting Travelers from the Brethren. After cementing his position as a leader of the Brethren and the Evergreen Foundation (their public face), Michael sets a plan in motion to increase his organization's power by generating terror in the populace. He hires a psychopath to kidnap children, thus increasing calls for greater surveillance, while Gabriel engineers a bold play to inform the world at large about the shady deeds perpetrated by the Evergreen Foundation. Despite the fact that this trilogy revolves around a high-stakes and often violent struggle between the forces of good and evil, it is oddly boring. Only a few well-wrought action sequences may hold the reader’s strained interest; the decidedly half baked inter-dimensional travel cosmology and bland New Age-y philosophizing will not.
Tepid and vague.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-51430-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
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
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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