An often clever mystery about a dysfunctional family going downhill.
Spending the holidays with family can be murder in Moore’s (Murder at the Country Club, 2018, etc.) contemporary cozy mystery.
Sally Braddock has been a widow for six years, and she lives on a 17-acre estate that’s so high up in the mountains above Vail, Colorado, that there’s no cellphone service. Now in her late 50s, she keeps in shape by swimming daily in her outdoor pool, regardless of the weather. Her businessman husband left her more than $3 billion and three spoiled, grown children. All the 30-something kids claim poverty, despite their multimillion-dollar trust funds, due to extravagant purchases (daughter Gwen owns an armada of luxury boats), ill-advised investing (son Lance funds movies for his actress/centerfold wife, Yvette), or snorting cocaine and gambling (favorite child Stephen is just out of rehab). Encouraged by their spouses, the siblings all ask Sally for more money during their annual Christmas visit. Upset, she screams that she plans to give 95 percent of her money to a charitable foundation. Her only true friend seems to be her devoted live-in housekeeper, Helga. After a winter storm knocks out the phone lines and internet service and blocks the road, one of the Braddocks is murdered—but was the deceased the intended victim? The next night brings another attack as well as news that someone has gone missing. Moore offers several twists and red herrings over the course of the novel, and she populates the well-paced mystery with a slew of imperfect characters. There are a few bits of characterization that readers may find difficult to believe, such as Gwen’s paying $50,000 for a purple purse. However, Moore’s depiction of the shadowy Helga is reminiscent of that of Daphne du Maurier’s Mrs. Danvers in the classic novel Rebecca. The book’s swimming and skiing scenes, which turn out to be crucial to the plot, benefit from the fact that the author is a former sportswriter: “The next run they tackled wasn’t as long, but it had a lot of challenging moguls. Gwen slowed down a bit, trying to figure out better ways to maneuver over the undulating hills.”
An often clever mystery about a dysfunctional family going downhill.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5390-3850-4
Page Count: 282
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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