A clever, fleet-footed cross-genre story with striking characters and unexpected turns.
London journalists delve into an increasingly complex and precarious conspiracy in Tree’s thriller set a few decades in the future.
Timothy Wyndham, a noted science correspondent for an English newspaper, generally turns down readers’ requests for personal meetings. He does, however, ultimately meet with one woman, Melissa Hogg, who’s convinced that her astrophysicist husband is in danger, and she hands Timothy photographs of a reputed saucer-shaped military prototype tied to a Royal Air Force base in Somerset, England. After a scientist tied to that RAF base mysteriously dies, Timothy sees a potential story. He gets assistance, albeit reluctantly, from Cathy Edge, a journalist at his publication whose past dalliance with him ended badly. Mostly what they dig up are more questions—about a second unexplained death, a seemingly untouchable neo-Nazi, and an enigmatic American who warns them to quit nosing around. Timothy and Cathy are dead set on getting their exclusive, provided they can stay alive long enough to piece together the growing puzzle. While Tree piles on the mysteries, the memorable cast makes the dense plot easy to follow. For example, it’s always apparent whom Timothy and Cathy trust and whom they suspect are villains; the unnerving American falls into the latter camp. Timothy also has a relationship with a newspaper intern, Adalyn, who navigates their explicitly detailed trysts with him in a businesslike fashion, which effectively throws the sexist protagonist into a deserved tailspin. Timothy’s first-person narration aptly recounts banter with Cathy and blends references to real-life government programs with SF tech. The prose also shines throughout: “Time was getting on and twilight could already be inferred from the sky’s greyness, which stretched unabated over the flatness of the airfield and the countryside beyond it.”
A clever, fleet-footed cross-genre story with striking characters and unexpected turns.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798873533862
Page Count: 217
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.
When one woman takes on another’s identity to uncover a crime, they both become suspects in a murder.
Aubrey Price and Camille Bayliss come from different worlds, only crossing paths because of the discovery that Camille’s husband, powerful lawyer Ben Bayliss, is hiding something terrible that affects them both. As the novel opens, Aubrey is driving Camille’s Range Rover, then teetering into a bar on Camille’s high heels, with Camille’s dress and credit cards and a wig that mimics Camille’s hair, pretending to be her because Ben tracks his wife’s every move and expenditure, and Camille wants to create a smokescreen while she sneaks into his office in search of evidence of that unnamed secret. But the scheme goes awry, and the women become each other’s alibis after Camille finds Ben murdered in their home. The first part of the book builds suspense and misdirection well, with Aubrey and Ben’s straight-arrow partner, Hank Landry, serving as first-person observers in some chapters while others track Camille. She’s a wealthy and privileged woman but not a happy one, stuck under the thumbs of her husband and her tyrannical father, Randall Everett, who pretty much runs their small Louisiana town. Aubrey was orphaned as a teen when her parents died in a car crash and has proudly fended for herself ever since, coming to depend on her four roommates, who have become friends. But as the cast of characters grows, it seems as if almost everyone in town has a motive for killing Ben, and the piling up of suspects and movements among different timelines can sometimes be confusing. And it all comes to a frustrating end when, after a whole school of red herrings, the solution to Ben’s murder arrives out of far left field.
This mystery’s promising premise bogs down in an overloaded cast.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9780593834459
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2026
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