Methodical, efficient, brand-name genre thrills guaranteed not to frighten the horses.
Laurie Moran and the crew of Under Suspicion (The Cinderella Murder, 2014, etc.) revisit the 5-year-old case of the bride who vanished hours before she was supposed to walk down the aisle.
Despite some understandable last-minute jitters on both sides, Amanda Pierce had been looking forward eagerly to joining hands in marriage with attorney Jeff Hunter at the splishy Grand Victoria Hotel in Palm Springs. Instead she went down in tabloid history as the runaway bride who disappeared the night before the ceremony. Now her mother, Sandra Pierce, wants Under Suspicion, which specializes in dramatizing, and incidentally solving, cold cases on television, to reopen the mystery. Producer Laurie gets Walter Pierce, Sandra’s workaholic ex, on board, along with bridesmaids Kate Fulton, Meghan White, and Charlotte Pierce, the bride’s older sister, and groomsmen Nick Young, Austin Pratt, and Henry Pierce, the bride’s brother. Complications have already arisen before the Under Suspicion crew even arrives in Florida. Jeff is now married to Meghan, whom he had dated briefly before she introduced him to Amanda back at Colby College, the school the wedding party had all attended. Bill Walker, the wedding photographer, suddenly recalls that the police never questioned his intern, Jeremy Carroll, who, then as now, seemed a little bit off. Laurie can’t quite satisfy herself why Amanda would have left her modest belongings to Sandra Pierce, Henry’s daughter, but her $2 million trust fund to the fiance she’d just gotten to sign a prenup. And news about the strangling of Colby student Carly Romano back in the wedding party’s college days hangs like a dark cloud over the increasingly tense Grand Victoria.
Methodical, efficient, brand-name genre thrills guaranteed not to frighten the horses.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0855-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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