A sometimes-dense but informative novel set in Communist Bucharest.
In LaFlash’s debut novel, a college student searches for her missing boyfriend in Communist Romania.
In 1957 Bucharest, medical student Virginia Gemanar has been dating her boyfriend, Jenica Cureteanu, for a year. They’ve always talked about going to see a concert at the city’s Athenaeum, and when Jenica calls to tell Virginia he’s scored tickets, she’s filled with excitement. When she goes to meet him the next day at a statue by the concert hall, however, he doesn’t show. She spends the rest of the day hanging out at the apartment of her friends Mircea and Doina, hoping that Jenica will appear. It doesn’t make sense for Jenica to have vanished—he isn’t connected to any criminals or anyone the police might consider subversive—but Virginia is still afraid to go to the authorities; ever since Romania joined the Warsaw Pact a few years earlier, the country has been run as a police state. “Jenica’s unexpected disappearance kept [Virginia] awake and wondering….The question so tormented her that she started thinking the worst, even the possibility that he might have been abducted and killed and that she would never see him again.” The next morning, Virginia heads to Jenica’s dorm to discover that several books are missing, and under his bed, she finds a suitcase filled with moldy notebooks. Strangest of all, the only person who claims to have seen Jenica recently—an ex-roommate—is behaving strangely and sporting a mysterious bruise. With no one to rely on except a few trusted pals, Virginia is forced to play the role of detective, sifting through clues and rumors to figure out just where Jenica went and if it’s possible to bring him back.
LaFlash, who grew up in Romania, immigrated to the United States in 1997 after the fall of Communism, and although her prose comes off as slightly awkward at times, it consistently reveals her deep knowledge of life in Bucharest under the Securitate, with plenty of specific detail: “Virginia’s heart sank. Almost everyone in Bucharest knew that the Jilava Penitentiary was one of the country’s largest and most dreaded….The army later converted it into a site for preventative and posttrial imprisonment for males who had been accused and found guilty of political crimes.” Over the course of the novel, one will find plenty of similarly expositional moments, which give the work as a whole a slightly didactic quality, as if the entire purpose of the plot were merely to dramatize this particular period in Romanian history. As a result, many of the characters in this narrative feel thinly drawn, and they reflect less moral ambiguity than readers might be expecting to find in people living under such difficult circumstances. Even so, the story’s mystery elements keep the plot consistently moving forward, and the reader will be just as anxious as Virginia to discover the fate of her missing boyfriend as her search takes her into a dangerous subterranean world of dissidents and secret police.
A sometimes-dense but informative novel set in Communist Bucharest.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-578-25460-9
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.
Dead bodies turn up in the first sentence of the prologue in McFadden’s latest domestic thriller.
The mystery of who died is at the pulsating heart of this propulsive tale. As Chapter 1 begins, Naomi arrives home to find the locks changed on the front door of the gorgeous home she shares with her husband, Jeremy, and their 5-year-old son, Teddy. Jeremy steps out the front door and convinces Naomi to move out while he has their home renovated, a plan Naomi knows nothing about. It’s all a ruse, though, as the next day Jeremy tells her he wants a divorce. Naomi is shellshocked and soon discovers that Jeremy is having an affair with Veronica, a beautiful younger woman. What seems at first like a stereotypical story about a man who leaves his wife turns into something else when Naomi decides she’ll do anything to get Veronica away from Jeremy and Teddy, and Veronica decides to fight for what she thinks she deserves. Fans of stalker novels will cringe with delight as creepy things start to happen. Teddy’s stuffed elephant, a gift from Veronica, is found impaled on a kitchen knife; Naomi suspects Jeremy is gaslighting her and that Veronica tried to poison her. A weird confrontation among Jeremy, Veronica, and Naomi at Teddy’s birthday party, to which Naomi shows up uninvited, is priceless. There are three main characters, and any or all of them may be unreliable narrators. Packing the plot with dark, gasp-inducing twists, McFadden outdoes herself in a story about how highly emotional people engage in risky behavior to get what they want—but in this novel, for better or worse, not everyone will survive.
Trust no one in this over-the-top tale of deception and revenge.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781464249631
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
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
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