Mystery fans will cherish echoes of The Doorbell Rang and The Long Goodbye, but the best news is that prodigious Connelly...
Retired from the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, Harry Bosch (City of Bones, 2002, etc.) has taken out a p.i.’s license—a lucky thing, because a hailstorm of backlogged felonies is about to come his way.
The edge of the wedge is the unsolved strangling of Angella Benton, an underling at Eidolon Productions. Harry had worked the case for only a few days before it was snatched away from him by Robbery-Homicide, whose investigators linked the killing to a more high-profile crime only a few days later—the theft of $2 million on a one-day loan to an Eidolon-produced movie and the shooting of the security chief responsible for minding it—before running out of leads. Now Lawton Cross, one of the two Robbery-Homicide dicks, paralyzed in still another shootout that left his partner dead, has dredged up an intriguing fact that’s never been made public: An FBI agent tracking marked currency had called Cross’s partner to tell him that one of the bills reported stolen in the Eidolon heist had already been seized by police in an unrelated case. What makes this lead especially hot is that the agent in question vanished only a few days after making the call, and that a second allegedly stolen bill has been traced to Mousouwa Aziz, a suspected money courier for international terrorists. It all adds up to a fine mess: an endless chain of felonies, turf battles between the LAPD and the FBI, and real trouble for Harry when the Feebs decide that he’s taken too close an interest in Aziz and come after him with all the new legal powers they’ve been granted since 9/11, and then some. Amazingly, Connelly manages to keep every new curve not only clear but breathlessly exciting.
Mystery fans will cherish echoes of The Doorbell Rang and The Long Goodbye, but the best news is that prodigious Connelly hasn’t been content simply to echo his own earlier successes.Pub Date: April 29, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-15460-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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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