by Mallory McCane O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
An enjoyably multilayered blending of supernatural fiction and art heist thriller.
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A psychic and a special agent team up to solve an art theft mystery in a thriller with dark supernatural overtones.
Private investigator Maro Gaido, the brooding, sullen ex–FBI agent who’s one of the two stars of the latest novel from O’Connor (Epiphany's Gift, 2019), is obsessed with tracking down and retrieving the thousands of priceless artifacts looted from the Baghdad Museum during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. In his capacity as a PI assigned to the FBI’s art theft team, Gaido has hunted thieves and identified buyers all over the world, aided by his fluency in Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, and Farsi. But as the novel opens, he feels he’s reached a dead end and devises a last-ditch tactic: He contacts Epiphany Mayall, a former colleague (and maybe something more) who works as a psychic medium in Watoolahatchee, Florida, whose “small Spiritualist community” bills itself as the “Psychic Capital of the World.” The contact seems more the coincidental: Just recently, Mayall had highly detailed dreams that she realized were visions of the looting of the Baghdad Museum. She hadn’t known what to make of the dreams, and her consultation with her spirit guide suggested that Gaido might be involved. Mayall is at times ambivalent about her own psychic abilities: “Sometimes she just wanted it all to go away—for the voices to fall silent, the images [to] fade to black. To stop being a conduit between the living and the dead.” But she agrees to help Gaido in an investigation that soon involves the thoroughly evil and nihilistic energy company CEO Derrick Rarian, who has motives of his own for recovering certain looted artifacts—motives that have much more to do with Mayall’s supernatural realm than Gaido’s world of the black market for art. O’Connor handles the nuances of their relationship with a pleasing combination of humor and maturity, and this is also true for the dynamic of Mayall's extended family. The book’s thriller elements are somewhat predictable, but the writing throughout is clear and energetic.
An enjoyably multilayered blending of supernatural fiction and art heist thriller.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robinne Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 13, 2017
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.
When Solène Marchand takes her 12-year-old daughter to a concert by the hottest boy band on the planet, she doesn't expect to fall in love with one of the singers.
Middle-aged art gallery owner Solène hasn’t dated since her divorce, but when her ex-husband buys their daughter and a group of her friends tickets to Vegas and a backstage concert experience, then backs out at the last minute, she steps in as escort. The five guys in the wildly popular English boy band August Moon appeal to women of all ages, but Hayes, the brains behind the group’s success, flirts with Solène at the concert meet and greet, invites them to a party after the show, then pursues her once she gets back to Los Angeles. He’s only 20 and he’s incredibly famous; his attention is flattering and heady. The two fall into an affair that’s supposed to be light and easy, but before long they can’t ignore their intense emotional attachment. Solène is hesitant to tell her daughter, but when she procrastinates, Isabelle learns about it through an online tabloid, which damages their relationship and leaves Solène open to censure from her ex. Then, once the affair goes viral, she experiences the darker side of Hayes’ fan base. What started out as a jaunty adventure turns into an emotionally fraught journey, and Solène must decide what she’s willing to risk for her happiness and what she won’t risk for her daughter’s. Actress Lee, who appeared in Fifty Shades Darker, debuts with a beautifully written novel that explores sex, love, romance, and fantasy in moving, insightful ways while also examining a woman’s struggle with aging and sexism, with a nod at the tension between celebrity and privacy.
A fascinating, thought-provoking, genre-bending romantic read.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-12590-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Kathy Reichs ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 17, 2020
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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