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
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
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.
A man walks out of a bar and his life becomes a kaleidoscope of altered states in this science-fiction thriller.
Crouch opens on a family in a warm, resonant domestic moment with three well-developed characters. At home in Chicago’s Logan Square, Jason Dessen dices an onion while his wife, Daniela, sips wine and chats on the phone. Their son, Charlie, an appealing 15-year-old, sketches on a pad. Still, an undertone of regret hovers over the couple, a preoccupation with roads not taken, a theme the book will literally explore, in multifarious ways. To start, both Jason and Daniela abandoned careers that might have soared, Jason as a physicist, Daniela as an artist. When Charlie was born, he suffered a major illness. Jason was forced to abandon promising research to teach undergraduates at a small college. Daniela turned from having gallery shows to teaching private art lessons to middle school students. On this bracing October evening, Jason visits a local bar to pay homage to Ryan Holder, a former college roommate who just received a major award for his work in neuroscience, an honor that rankles Jason, who, Ryan says, gave up on his career. Smarting from the comment, Jason suffers “a sucker punch” as he heads home that leaves him “standing on the precipice.” From behind Jason, a man with a “ghost white” face, “red, pursed lips," and "horrifying eyes” points a gun at Jason and forces him to drive an SUV, following preset navigational directions. At their destination, the abductor forces Jason to strip naked, beats him, then leads him into a vast, abandoned power plant. Here, Jason meets men and women who insist they want to help him. Attempting to escape, Jason opens a door that leads him into a series of dark, strange, yet eerily familiar encounters that sometimes strain credibility, especially in the tale's final moments.
Suspenseful, frightening, and sometimes poignant—provided the reader has a generously willing suspension of disbelief.Pub Date: July 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90422-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
