A quietly absorbing story of fractured family ties and deception.
A high school teacher learns dark, unwelcome secrets may be hiding in her family’s tumultuous lives in Wells’ thriller.
Floridian Leigh Prentiss is upset when, at the last minute, her husband, Garrett, bows out of a family getaway. It’s not entirely surprising, though, as his law firm keeps him busy. So Leigh and the couple’s two kids, 15-year-old Jay and 7-year-old Jenny, head to their beloved three-story beach house on the East Coast of Florida. There’s good news: Leigh’s younger sister, Kristen, will join the family for at least a couple of days. It’s a chance for Leigh to confide in her sister about Garrett, who’s been distant—the once-close husband and wife now habitually argue. Garrett having an affair is definitely one possibility, but there’s a lot more going on than Leigh knows. Kristen, for instance, hasn’t told her everything about her own recent split, brought on after she caught her husband cheating. And Garrett is working through a few things of his own, namely an unexpected hitch with a startup company he’s got a share in. Meanwhile, over in Midnight Beach, Leigh has more than one happy run-in with handsome former Marine Jack McDermott, an ex-investment advisor turned beach patrol manager. His warmhearted nature and friendship are exactly what Leigh needs…but perhaps something deeper is growing between the two. In the midst of all this chaos, there’s someone angry enough to kill.
Wells’ story is an impressive exercise in subtlety. It draws readers in with its depiction of a strained marriage and a mother worried that her children miss their absent father; readers, at the outset, only know as much as Leigh, who simply can’t explain the “rift” between the couple. The alternating narrative perspectives of Kristen, Garrett, and others gradually illuminate all that’s been unfolding over the previous six months. The author gleefully piles on savory thriller ingredients: snooping through emails, the appearance of threatening notes, and suppressed resentment sparking hate-fueled revenge. Nevertheless, a few morsels wind up lost in the mix, such as one serious crime that the story, rather oddly, barely acknowledges. Leigh and Jack’s nascent romance is nuanced; they hit it off on an emotional level (“She felt as though he was an old friend, although they’d met officially only last evening at the concert”). But the novel’s highlight is the connection between Leigh and her kids. Like all great mothers, she loves them unconditionally, even as the incessantly sullen teen Jay ignores her and the much younger Jenny clings to her. Wells’ concise prose keeps the narrative moving at a steady beat—surprising turns come one after another. Most of the intersecting sub-plots wrap up convincingly; some are predictable, while others are left open, implying the directions certain relationships will go. The murder happens later in the tale than some readers may anticipate, but its impact is great and leads to an unforgettable ending.
A quietly absorbing story of fractured family ties and deception.Pub Date: July 7, 2023
ISBN: 9798375800363
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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