A rousing, suspenseful crime drama with memorable characters.
An Arizona teenager’s life becomes marred by betrayal and violence in this novel.
Joy’s tale chronicles the adolescent years of Joey Blade, a high school senior football star in Phoenix. His plucky ex-girlfriend Mallory Stewart encourages a reluctant Joey to go to Los Angeles to check out colleges for a sports scholarship despite discouraging words from his mother, Callie, and Vietnam veteran father, Dutch, who prefer he remain with the family’s lucrative engine rebuilding business. A bright future studying writing beckons. But first is a millennium-eve bonfire party where Joey celebrates his 18th birthday with new girlfriend Wendy Chang and her provocative pot dealer, TJ Grimes. What’s intended as a mostly innocent night turns solemn when Mallory reveals her pregnancy and the bonfire explodes, sending fiery embers into the crowd. Joey, Wendy, and TJ speed away. Unfortunately, after they are taunted by Wendy’s ex-flame Lawrence Darville on the road, TJ pulls a gun in a subsequent police shootout that finds Joey, the driver, tossed in jail. TJ disappears, and the ensuing months revolve around Joey dealing with the court proceedings, rekindling things with Mallory, and quelling the melodrama surrounding Wendy, who lied to the police about the gun’s owner. The effort to find TJ to clear Joey is expedited thanks to drug lord Chico Torres, whom Joey met in jail. In Joy’s novel, Joey emerges as a fully developed character to root for. His path to freedom doesn’t come easily, spanning the story’s second half, which depicts him as an adult with unfinished business. The author is careful never to allow the tale’s hard-won momentum to dissipate and is masterful at keeping all the plot pieces in motion as they play out. The raw, gritty lives of these teens are portrayed in an unadorned yet highly charged narrative in which trouble is plentiful. Joy is distinctly talented at characterization, especially with the convincing life of Joey, whose future is placed in jeopardy after some ill-conceived decisions. The author’s prose is crisply paced and lively. As he demonstrated in previous novels, Joy has a firm grip on how effective a solid combination of a strong storyline and a core cast of vivid, anchoring characters can be in a tale where youthful innocence becomes tarnished by consequences.
A rousing, suspenseful crime drama with memorable characters.Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952782-51-0
Page Count: 342
Publisher: BQB Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.
On the isle of Capri, Helen Lingate seeks revenge on the people responsible for her mother’s death 30 years earlier—her own family.
When Sarah Lingate fell to her death on Capri in 1992, she left behind a 3-year-old daughter, Helen, and a legacy as a gifted playwright; her favorite necklace of golden snakes was lost to the sea. Thirty years later, Helen, chafing at the restrictions she’s grown up under as a member of the old-money Lingate family, hatches a plan with her uncle Marcus’ assistant, Lorna Moreno, to blackmail her uncle and her father with that same necklace, which mysteriously entered her possession a few months before. The novel begins on Capri just after Lorna disappears, and then traces her steps from 36 hours earlier. Interweaving chapters from the points of view of Helen, Lorna, and Sarah—as well as, later, a few others—we learn how Sarah gradually became stifled by the constant pressure of keeping up appearances until she became inspired to write a play, Saltwater, that was a not-so-thinly veiled tell-all revealing dark Lingate family secrets. It was shortly after this that she fell to her death. The loss of her mother has come to define Helen’s life, and if she can use the necklace as leverage to escape her family, and maybe learn the truth along the way, she’ll take the risk. Lorna’s motives are both murkier and more straightforward—she’s never had money, and she’s got a chip on her shoulder about it, so splitting 10 million euros with Helen sounds like a way to discard her past and start fresh. These strong, conniving women drive the drama and the narrative, and they are captivating enough that as twist after twist begins to unfurl, the novel still feels character-driven. The end—well, the end shocks. And it’s well earned. By the time the sun sets on the gorgeous excess and rugged coast of Capri, lives will have been destroyed.
A feisty storm of Greek tragedy headlined by three very modern women.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593875551
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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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