A buoyant, unrestrained Grand Guignol noir, relishing the journey, indifferent to the destination.
An abrasive, erudite detective matches wits with an uber-violent serial killer.
When Bill and Joanne Lauterbach's worried daughter is unable to reach them for days, police check out the couple's home. Rookie patrolman Evan Porter and his training supervisor, Sgt. Melissa Banning, find a chaotic, horrific scene. Porter announces cryptically that “the house is bleeding” before going inside, where he’s violently attacked, ending up in the ICU. Banning’s not so lucky. This is the fourth bloody incident involving The Eastside Creeper, a killer believed to spend hours hiding inside other people’s homes before he violently strikes. Nerves in Los Angeles are already frayed because of a massive earthquake a week earlier, and morale at the Hollywood police station is understandably low. Enter sardonic, overeducated LAPD detective Tully Jarsdel, who banters with his partner, Morales, over the killer’s profile. Bureaucratic scrambling comes to the fore as Jarsdel’s taken off the case, then invited onto Hollywood Special, the new unit handling it. Tensions rise even higher after the wife of the lieutenant leading the Special becomes a victim. The road to apprehension is full of detours that accommodate Schneider’s juicy prose and quirky characters. There’s an extended feud with Jarsdel’s increasingly irrational father. And Jarsdel, who left a Ph.D. program in English to join the force, describes the opinions of colleague and possible love interest Alisha Varna as “obelisks of intellectual rigor.”
A buoyant, unrestrained Grand Guignol noir, relishing the journey, indifferent to the destination.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4926-8447-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Great crime fiction.
An apparent suicide threatens to destroy an Irish farm town in the final volume of French’s Cal Hooper trilogy.
In the fictional western Ireland townland of Ardnakelty, “there’s a girl going after missing.” Soon young Rachel Holohan is found dead in the river. Shortly before, she had stopped at Lena Dunne’s home, and nothing had seemed amiss. The medical examiner determines she’d swallowed antifreeze, and he presumes she then fell from a bridge into the water. The medical examiner and the town agree she’d died by suicide. But there is far more to the plot: 16-year-old Trey Reddy thinks Tommy Moynihan murdered Rachel. Moynihan doles out favors and punishments to the local townsfolk, who know it’s best not to cross him. Now rumors spread that Moynihan wants land and has a secret plan to forcibly buy up parcels from the locals. A factory will be built, or a great big data center, or who knows what. If Tommy’s son, Eugene, can get elected to the local council, then compulsory purchase orders for land will follow, and the farms will disappear. Eugene, who’d been romantically involved with Rachel, is wonderfully described as “on the weedy edge of good-looking” and just fine as long as you “don’t have high expectations in the way of chins.” Lena is engaged to the American Cal Hooper, an ex-cop turned woodworker. They are “more or less raising” Trey, and these three core characters are drawn into the mystery of Rachel’s death and may have to face the looming clouds of civilizational change for Ardnakelty. Lena is chastised for “asking your wee questions all round the townland,” and Trey wants to quit school, against Cal’s advice. Finally, the story’s best line: “You can’t go killing people just because they deserve it.”
Great crime fiction.Pub Date: March 31, 2026
ISBN: 9780593493465
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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