A promising premise disintegrates into a rather unbelievable story about halfway through the book.
Millar’s sophomore effort derives its impetus from the idea that, for some people, bad luck is inevitable.
Kate lost her parents to a car accident on her wedding night and then, years later, thugs murdered her beloved husband, Hugo. Ever since Hugo’s death, Kate has fought depression, not always successfully. Now, she lives with her son Jack in Oxford, England, near her in-laws, and struggles not to lose her mind. Her problem? She can’t stop computing the odds that something bad will happen. Whether it’s riding her bike without a helmet or crossing the street or someone breaking into her home, Kate is terrified she and Jack will become victims of the same types of crimes that took her parents and husband. So she tries to insulate both herself and Jack from the possibility that something bad could happen to them. She refuses to let Jack go anywhere by himself and wraps them both in a cocoon of alarms, sets unreasonable boundaries and often resorts to bizarre measures. But her husband’s parents are horrified at what they see: Kate is quickly turning Jack into a terrified, neurotic mess. Her mother-in-law says she’ll take Jack from Kate if she doesn’t clean up her act. Then Kate meets Jago, a visiting professor who specializes in statistical analysis. Jago makes her feel alive for the first time in years, and more importantly, he sets about helping her overcome her fears—but are they really unfounded? Soon, she and everyone around her will discover the fateful answer. Millar spins an infectious, engrossing and inventive story, but once she brings a new man into the picture, the storyline starts tilting toward the ridiculous. Suggesting that a woman as fearful and tenuous as Kate would dive wholeheartedly into opportunities to commit crimes and be willingly victimized will stretch the credulity of most readers.
A promising premise disintegrates into a rather unbelievable story about halfway through the book.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-5670-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Emily Bestler/Atria
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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