Well-drawn characters and startling turns of phrase distinguish this soapy, suspenseful start of a trilogy.
Suicide devastates both a prosperous Canadian and a Nigerian family in this first novel from filmmaker, playwright, and short story writer Idada (A Box of Chocolates, 2013, etc.).
After discovering her husband’s infidelities, Annabelle Sciorra dons her wedding dress and commits suicide by hanging herself. Her husband, Andrew, is in the midst of one such tryst when he receives news of her death, which sends him into an immediate fugue state. Thanks to the diamond trade, the Sciorra clan is one of the five wealthiest families in Canada. Now their fortune is vulnerable to the scheming Timothy Vinelatter, a sociopathic businessman who’s stolen the heart of Therese, Andrew and Annabelle’s only daughter. Luckily, Phillip Neri, Andrew’s loyal personal assistant, sees past Timothy’s facade. The two men wage war over Andrew’s reputation in a series of power plays that involves a powerful Canadian newspaper editor, a malicious private investigator, and one of Andrew’s mistresses. Idada intersperses the Sciorra saga with the story of Nigeria’s Eweka family. After his street-smart, troubled older son, Osasu, robs him of his business, Ibude Eweka commits suicide by gassing himself with “the noxious fumes” of his car’s exhaust pipe. His grief-stricken younger son, Nosa, promptly heads to Canada to track down his brother; Osasu, meanwhile, conspires to steal the Sciorra family fortune by romancing Angela Di Canio, the late Annabelle’s assistant. Although the Osasu and Nosa passages add a welcome dash of social realism—particularly those concerning the latter’s immigrant struggles in Canada—they nonetheless seem tangential to the Sciorra theatrics that dominate the majority of the narrative. That said, the connections between the two families deepen by the book’s end, and as this book is the first entry of a proposed trilogy, those bonds will likely strengthen in subsequent volumes. For now, Idada, like a patient chess player, slowly ratchets up the tension with his compelling cat-and-mouse games. He also writes occasionally haunting prose, as in an early image of Annabelle’s deceased body as slack “like a marionette at rest.”
Well-drawn characters and startling turns of phrase distinguish this soapy, suspenseful start of a trilogy.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1501080562
Page Count: 410
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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