Evanovich fans may enjoy, but devotees of harder-edged thrillers will be disappointed.
Janet Evanovich meets Thomas Harris in Gagnon’s uneven fifth thriller.
Street-smart Amber Jamison is mortified when she finds herself “bound up like a sushi roll” in a van, potentially the next victim of a serial killer terrorizing Johnson City, Tennessee. Before the Pokémon-obsessed psycho can finish her off, she's rescued by a ski mask–wearing woman armed with a cattle prod who disappears before Amber can learn why this mysterious stranger is hunting serial murderers. Escaping the Pikachu Killer is just the start of our protagonist's misadventures. After an FBI agent calls to set up an interview, Amber, fearful that law enforcement may have uncovered her grifter past, flees her carefully built life as a college student and heads to Las Vegas, where she settles in at the seedy Getaway Motel. Her reprieve, though, is brief; Grace, Amber’s ski mask–wearing savior, arrives on her doorstep, warning that the killer she’s pursuing is stalking Amber, and is later attacked. Amber must rely on her best grifter skills and the support of noir-loving motel manager Dot, romantic interest and sex worker with a heart of gold Marcella, and the injured Grace to catch a monster. Mixing snarky humor that often falls flat and increasingly far-fetched situations with gruesome serial killings makes for a queasy read. Also suffering from queasiness is a lead character who constantly vomits to reveal her emotional turmoil, whether from fear, panic attack, drugs and booze, or revealing her innermost secrets. That’s just lazy writing. The switch from Amber’s sarcastic first-person narration to the solemn third person to reveal the serial killer’s backstory feels clunky and manipulative. Underneath this mess lie the bones of a good thriller about resourceful, empowered women who team up to fight back.
Evanovich fans may enjoy, but devotees of harder-edged thrillers will be disappointed.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9780593540749
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.
When two women who share a birthday meet, a journalist becomes the subject of her own true-crime mystery.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. Alix is a successful journalist, and Josie convinces Alix that her story is worth telling: Josie met her husband when she was 13 and he was 40. “I can see that maybe I was being used, that maybe I was even being groomed?” she confesses to Alix. “But that feeling of being powerful, right at the start, when I was still in control. I miss that sometimes. I really do. And what I’d like, more than anything, is to get it back.” From this premise Alix creates a Netflix series, Hi! I’m Your Birthday Twin! which investigates Josie’s life as she reconciles what happened to her as a teen and seeks a new path. With the story unfinished, the narrative unfolds in the present tense, with prose that jingles like song lyrics: “He turns to see if the girl is behind him, and sees her wishy-washy, wavy-wavy, in double vision through the glass windows of the hotel.” Alix is both intrigued and repulsed by Josie, but she initially gives her the benefit of the doubt. After all, Alix’s husband, Nathan, has a drinking problem, and Alix knows what it’s like to be reluctant to leave a bad situation. But Josie seems more interested in being part of Alix’s seemingly glamorous life than she is in fixing her own, and when three people end up dead and Alix’s life is turned upside down, the evidence points to Josie—and turns the TV series into a murder mystery. Transcripts from Alix’s interviews alternate with the narrative, offering increasingly varied perspectives on Josie’s story as told by her neighbors, friends, and family members. With so many versions of events, the ending shatters, leaving readers to decide whose is the truth.
It's hard to read but hard to look away from.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781982179007
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.
Coulter’s treasured FBI agents take on two cases marked by danger and personal involvement.
Dillon Savitch and his wife, Lacey Sherlock, have special abilities that have served them well in law enforcement (Paradox, 2018, etc.). But that doesn't prevent Sherlock’s car from hitting a running man after having been struck by a speeding SUV that runs a red light. The runner, though clearly injured, continues on his way and disappears. Not so the SUV driver, a security engineer for the Bexholt Group, which has ties to government agencies. Sherlock’s own concussion causes memory loss so severe that she doesn’t recognize Savitch or remember their son, Sean. The whole incident seems more suspicious when a blood test from the splatter of the man Sherlock hit reveals that he’s Justice Cummings, an analyst for the CIA. The agency’s refusal to cooperate makes Savitch certain that Bexholt is involved in a deep-laid plot. Meanwhile, Special Agent Griffin Hammersmith is visiting friends who run a cafe in the touristy Virginia town of Gaffers Ridge. Hammersmith, who has psychic abilities, is taken aback when he hears in his mind a woman’s cry for help. Reporter Carson DeSilva, who came to the area to interview a Nobel Prize winner, also has psychic abilities, and she overhears the thoughts of Rafer Bodine, a young man who has apparently kidnapped and possibly murdered three teenage girls. Unluckily, she blurts out her thoughts, and she’s snatched and tied up in a cellar by Bodine. Bodine may be a killer, but he’s also the nephew of the sheriff and the son of the local bigwig. So the sheriff arrests Hammersmith and refuses to accept his FBI credentials. Bodine's mother has psychic powers strong enough to kill, but she meets her match in Hammersmith, DeSilva, Savitch, and Sherlock.
Greed, love, and extrasensory abilities combine in two middling mysteries.Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9365-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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