Despite much insider lore about jewelry and objets d’art, a suspenseful account, with humor and a real sense of style.
A witty page-turner from the author of, most recently, Insatiable (2001).
The urbane Kick Keswick is senior executive assistant at the venerable London auction firm of Ballantine & Co. The daughter of an Oklahoma prostitute, Kick never had a leg up in the world until she was 18—when she was picked up (literally) by Sir Cranmer Ballantine, who spied her stranded in a pouring rain, gave her a lift to Claridge’s, and made her his mistress. Eventually, Kick became Cranmer’s secretary as well, a post she kept when his son Benjamin took over the business—to disastrous effect. So incompetent was Benjamin that, within a few years, Ballantine had been bought out by American millionaire Owen Brace (though Sir Cramner had set up a secret trust that still allowed Kick anonymously to control 15 percent of the business). Owen brought in a passel of Americans who knew even less about the auction trade than Benjamin did, but he was smart enough to keep Kick, who knew all the upper-echelon secrets of the London art market and was able, for a start, to convince Owen not to wear gold chains when making sales pitches to British lords. Soon Ballantine’s is getting high-profile commissions again and Kick has once more become the boss’s mistress. But she has a few secrets up her sleeve: in fact, she has a secret identity. Not only does she control part of Owen’s business behind his back, but she’s a jewel thief who processes her loot through a complicated network of Lichtenstein banks. Her latest haul came from Lady Melody Carstairs, whose boudoir Kick burgled while Owen was downstairs negotiating an auction contract: a contract that Lady Melody signed seconds before falling dead. As Kick prepares the jewels for sale, she grows increasingly troubled. Theft is one thing—but murder?
Despite much insider lore about jewelry and objets d’art, a suspenseful account, with humor and a real sense of style.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30347-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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