This winning novel captures the moments when emotional lightning strikes for its three protagonists.
Bizarre circumstances help three broken loners connect to one another in Montgomery’s touching debut novel.
Set against the sprawling backdrop of New Mexico, this novel posits an unseen current running through the world that can bring people together. Autistic boy Jed Hark can hear voices in electricity. After Jed’s parents abandon their unusual son, he ends up at the SafeHaven treatment center in the charge of social worker John Allard. Allard has a romantic relationship with Simone Smith, a distant, one-time rising star sculptor who becomes bogged down while attempting to complete her latest massive landscape installation. Ex-con Neal Carver is riding cross-country on a motorcycle that once belonged to his deadbeat dad (“Handed down, father-to-son, Neal had resurrected it, and now it was part of him”). He makes the mistake of staying in a card game with Sixto and Reba, a psychotic couple; Neal wins the final hand, but they later steal his bike. He retaliates by taking their stash of $66,000, and the chase is on. While trying to escape, Neal is struck by lightning. Neal steals a van in which Jed, who’s run away from SafeHaven, stows away, and they end up taking shelter at Simone’s ranch. The trio bond as they flee their evil pursuers. Montgomery’s tale illustrates the maxim that there’s somebody for everybody. These three damaged, self-involved people, all abandoned by their parents, learn how to change and care about others when forced together by trouble—self-preservation should have dictated that they run in opposite directions. But Jed wants to find someone who will accept him, as odd as he is; Simone and Neal require incentives to lower their walls, and they find them in Jed and each other. The author convincingly depicts this makeshift family forming organically amid turmoil. Sixto and Reba are over-the-top villains, but they definitely pose a threat. Montgomery has successfully created a group of outsiders whom readers will want to see survive and thrive.
This winning novel captures the moments when emotional lightning strikes for its three protagonists.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 9780578497723
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Stonehouse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.
More than a decade after a Georgia man is convicted of a monstrous double murder, an uncomfortably similar crime frees him and resets the search for the guilty party.
In Clifton County, home to the Rich Cliftons and the other Cliftons, the disappearance of teens Madison Dalrymple and Cheyenne Baker during the Halloween festivities hits everyone in North Falls hard. Working with her father, Sheriff Gerald Clifton, Deputy Emmy Lou Clifton hears the clock ticking down as she races frantically to get leads on the two friends, who’d been secretly plotting to take off for Atlanta after some undisclosed big score. As a longtime friend of Madison’s mother, Hannah, Emmy hopes against hope to find the missing teens before they’re both dead. By the time Emmy’s hopes are dashed, two unpleasantly likely suspects with strong attachments to underage sex partners have emerged, and one of them ends up in prison. In a bold move, Slaughter jumps over the next 12 years to the case of Paisley Walker, a 14-year-old whose disappearance catches the eye of retiring FBI criminal psychologist Jude Archer, who promptly crosses the country to come to Clifton County and take charge—um, that is, consult—on this heartrending new investigation. Emmy, suddenly and shockingly deprived of counsel from the parents who’ve supported her all her life, doesn’t get along any better with Jude than with the larger circle of Cliftons and the Clifton-Cliftons. But together they identify one new suspect, then another, before a shootout that arrives so early you just know there are still more surprises to come.
Although it lacks the surgical precision of Slaughter’s very best nightmares, this one richly earns its title.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2025
ISBN: 9780063336773
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
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
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