A sexy, energetic page-turner just one heavy edit away from mass-market appeal.
In Lando’s debut novel, a former porn star tries to escape her sordid past, but she can’t seem to shake the violence and political intrigue that follow in her wake.
The trauma of an abortion drives a jilted teenager toward the porn industry in Los Angeles, where she falls under the purview of a powerful, violent operator who dabbles in human trafficking. Meanwhile, a charismatic congressman is on his way to becoming the nation’s second black, first independent-party president, with the help of his beautiful, cutthroat advisor. Eventually, the storylines intersect. Throughout the novel, parallels are made between the porn industry and politics: both are industries in which things are accomplished through manipulation. There’s plenty of action, with satisfying amounts of sex, violence and suspense. Most of the characters are colorful and well developed, even the minor ones like a Mexican gangster or a righteous, busybody next-door neighbor in a small Midwestern town. The craving for love or acceptance that underpins all the characters’ actions makes them engaging and sympathetic. However, the book is prevented from truly taking off by its fatal tendency to indulge in excessive exposition. In church, main character Cristal Caprice (trying to live a new life as Bianca Nubreze), thinks to herself: “Do I have on too much makeup? Is my dress too revealing?” Then, the narration sticks in a clunky passage of telling, not showing: “It was a huge step for Bianca to show up in church, so everything, including how she dressed, turned into an internal struggle.” Later, an angry, lovelorn secondary character named Solae attacks and holds Cristal at gunpoint. Exasperatingly, the narration feels compelled to slow down what would be a high-drama scene by unnecessarily summarizing everything that just happened: “It was the hardest thing Solae had ever done—to attack Cristal and hold her at gunpoint.” If the author were to trim away the redundant, overly long explanations that bloat many paragraphs, then this tight, fast-paced thriller could hold its own against anything sold in mainstream bookstores.
A sexy, energetic page-turner just one heavy edit away from mass-market appeal.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1462024872
Page Count: 400
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2012
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
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
