A star athlete whose life has fallen apart finds that there’s still no place like home.
Chase Ford, the star of his high school basketball team, won a free ride to college and played for the Lakers before an accident ruined his knee and his career and his dependence on pain pills ruined his marriage to a famous singer. Now he’s paying a short visit to his hometown before he decides whether to accept the offer of an announcer’s job. Despite his success with basketball and women, he can’t shake his unhappy childhood. His mother was paralyzed in an accident, and his coldhearted father’s liaison with the woman he hired to care for the house produced a child Chase has never met. His return coincides with the murders of Jimmie Riley, the star of the Brandon Buffalos basketball team, and of Chase’s old coach. His high school nemesis, Sheriff Lincoln Kendall, is all too eager to tie Chase to those deaths. Chase, who’s secretly been helping those in need by paying their tax bills and other debts, plans to arrange a college account for Dolly Benavidez, his half sister. He still has special friends from high school: Marty, now a sheriff’s deputy; Birdie Hawkins, the game warden who always loved him; and Mercy Saylor, the high school beauty who played Chase and Kendall off against each other. Birdie, who generally has little time for the sheriff, points out a clue from the Riley crime scene: the print of a woman’s size Tony Lama boot, not exactly rare in Colorado farm and ranch country. Chase must sort through numerous suspects and layers of hidden undercurrents if he’s ever to resolve the conflicts in his life.
A humdinger of a first novel that brings together several gripping storylines, an appealingly flawed hero, and an intimate sense of life in small-town America.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10316-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Categories: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE | THRILLER | CRIME & LEGAL THRILLER
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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. 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
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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. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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