Layered and grandly operatic in scope and tension.
Four years after a woman allegedly murdered her best friends while sleepwalking, an ambitious London psychologist gets the opportunity to treat her—and to determine, once and for all, her guilt or innocence.
Dr. Benedict Prince, forensic psychologist and sleep specialist, is summoned to a meeting with Dr. Virginia Bloom (his boss at the Abbey Sleep Clinic) and a man from the Ministry of Justice to discuss a recent article in which Ben proposed a possible cure to “resignation syndrome,” which is when a patient enters a deep sleep, often lasting for years, as a way of directly avoiding trauma. The government wants Ben to conduct an experiment on a notorious (alleged) criminal: a young journalist named Anna Ogilvy, aka “Sleeping Beauty,” who’s believed to have murdered two people while sleepwalking, and who hasn’t woken up in the four years since. The government needs Anna awake so she can stand trial for these murders. Ben, of course, has little choice but to agree, and he begins sensory stimulation therapy, believing that if he can connect Anna’s subconscious to happy memories from her childhood, he may be able to wake her. Before she went to sleep, Anna was working to uncover a connection between one of the most notorious English murderers of the 20th century and a secret government experiment called MEDEA. While she might be guilty, Ben realizes that she might also have been a scapegoat for someone else’s murderous rage. And if this shadowy someone has previously killed to protect their secret, Anna’s waking may put her, and Ben, in danger. From the bowels of a notorious psychiatric hospital to a primeval forest to the sun-drenched beaches of Grand Cayman, Blake’s thriller invokes comparisons to Greek tragedies and locked-room mysteries alike, while exploring the additional complicated psychology of sleep and guilt. While this is fully a “whodunit” with an actual solution, it’s even more a “whydunit.” Once you pick it up, there’s no putting it down.
Layered and grandly operatic in scope and tension.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2024
ISBN: 9780063314153
Page Count: 448
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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
BOOK REVIEW
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