The best of Marklund's books to be published in the U.S., this work sets readers up for the next installment of the Annika...
Swedish tabloid reporter Annika Bengtzon investigates the murder of a legendary police detective whose unstable wife has been wrongly charged for the killing. Meanwhile, the brash Annika is investigated for the firebombing of her own house following the departure of her cheating husband.
The murdered cop, David Lindholm, who was shot in the genitals, was a TV celebrity known for his brilliant handling of a hostage crisis. But he was no hero to his wife, Julia, a former cop he subjected to years of psychological abuse. Experts say she suffers from multiple personality disorder, but she swears she saw another woman leave the murder scene after grabbing her now-missing 4-year-old son. Annika, who has two young children of her own, must get them resettled while digging into the Lindholms' shadowy past. Dragged into an alley by thugs who cut her with a knife and threaten to do worse to her kids if she doesn't back off, Annika finds a reluctant ally in a cop, Nina Hoffman, who has been friends with Julia since their days at the police academy but is mysteriously mum about David. The missing boy gets short shrift, and Marklund's use of italicized lines to punch up her characters' inner thoughts is annoying. But the plot is smart and suspenseful. The agreeably flawed Annika's personal story, which avoids clichés even as her husband falls into one in taking up with a beautiful blonde, draws us in. And Marklund knows her journalistic turf: Her rendering of the methods, internal politics and economics of newspapers is spot on.
The best of Marklund's books to be published in the U.S., this work sets readers up for the next installment of the Annika Bengtzon series, A Place in the Sun, with a tantalizing last-minute revelation.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-0697-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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