A solid thriller and a promising series debut.
In Edwards’ series starter, a gutsy emergency room physician is drawn into the dangerous hunt for a vicious serial killer.
Speeding to work just before sunrise, young trauma doctor Riley Brighton happens upon the body of an apparent hit-and-run victim in the middle of Los Angeles’s 101 freeway. A huge, menacing man with a black pickup abruptly warns her away from the scene; knowing first responders are on the way, Riley heads to LA City General, the hospital and medical school where she works in the ER. Her day only gets worse: The department head blindsides her with an interrogation about the recent death of a 6-year-old patient, a loss that shook Riley deeply (“Nothing had been the same since that night”), in a blatant attempt to scapegoat her for a colleague’s incompetence. The details of the hit-and-run suggest it wasn’t an ordinary accident—worse, there seems to be a connection to another recent fatality on the same stretch of freeway. That evening, when the police show up at Riley’s home with questions, she surmises that the victims were transgender. Riley’s sense of justice is outraged by the hate crimes, and she may be in danger as a known witness. She contacts “Avenging Allies,” a mysterious group that’s investigating the first highway murder, and gets caught up (against her better judgment) in the dangerous search for a savage monster as the body count rises. The novel’s plot, with its constant new developments, is a complicated web with many threads that take time to connect. (They add up to page-turning intrigue, but there are no surprise twists and little suspense.) Riley is an engaging hero, kind to her patients and colleagues, and courageous whether confronting obnoxious colleagues or putting herself in risky situations. The key supporting characters—including heart-of-gold Holly, a new friend of Riley’s, and Joe, the chief pathologist whose crush on Riley is an open secret—are also well drawn, though less well rounded. The narrative moves briskly, and although the office politics subplot has no direct relationship to the main mystery, it doesn’t slow things down and effectively demonstrates Riley’s character. The story includes gruesome medical details and mentions of child abuse, though almost all of the violence happens off-page.
A solid thriller and a promising series debut.Pub Date: May 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781647049683
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sugar Pine Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
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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