An artfully rendered tale of homicide and family intrigue.
Ekemar (The Complete Callaghan Tetralogy, 2015, etc.) presents a murder mystery set in a vineyard in the French countryside.
Patrice LaFarge is the cantankerous owner of the Clos Saint-Jacques estate and vineyard, a property of considerable commercial value. After a bitter dispute with his brother over inheritance-related issues, Patrice resolves to keep his holdings fully intact and prevent future development by others. However, he worries that his wishes won’t be respected by three of his children, who are all emotionally estranged from him. Henri is the most irresolute of the bunch and in constant need of financial support. Constance, who lives in Paris and works as a music hall artist, also squanders her money and regularly looks to Patrice for assistance. Michel, the eldest child, is a financially savvy businessman, but Patrice frets that he’ll sell his share of the land as soon as a good deal presents itself. Patrice consults with his lawyer and creates a fidei-commissum, a kind of trust in which the bank supervises the property and prevents its sale or development; it also funnels the income to the three siblings as well as Gaspard, a child from one of Patrice’s affairs, who runs the property. Patrice presents this plan to his progeny as a work in progress, and he locks the not-yet-notarized version in his room, using a key that he asked Gaspard to make. When the whole family meets to discuss the plan, they’re predictably enraged, and shortly after Patrice dies in a fire while locked in his own room. Inspector Jean-Claude Rimbaud is called in to investigate what increasingly looks like a homicide. Veteran author Ekemar puts the plot at a slow simmer, trickling out pertinent information while also maintaining suspense. There’s no shortage of motives among the characters; the lives of the siblings are full of personal disarray of one kind or another, making them each prime candidates for committing the crime. That said, these same characters could be more fully developed; Ekemar has a tendency to overexplain their quirks, rather than letting them reveal themselves through action and dialogue. Still, this book remains an intelligently fashioned mystery, giving its readers just enough information to be enthralled, but not so much that they become bored by predictability.
An artfully rendered tale of homicide and family intrigue.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2016
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 171
Publisher: Bradley & Brougham
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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