Confused? Few readers will care enough to unravel this ridiculous plot.
Memories of previous lives that include some rather tense negotiations with a great 19th-century composer send a young woman to Vienna, where a very unhappy reporter hopes to blow up the Philharmonic.
Rose (The Reincarnationist, 2008, etc.) fails to resist the temptation to tie her moody but attractive heroine’s karma to an immensely interesting historical figure rather than the much more likely run of hog butchers and pony farmers that populate most people’s pasts. In the case of Meer Logan, the monumental figure whose path she crossed at the Congress of Vienna is Ludwig van Beethoven. Haunted since childhood by dark but immensely interesting episodes from an exciting back story, Meer has learned from her therapist enough wobbly control tips to keep from slipping into madness. Now her father, a dealer in Judaica, has located in Vienna the very puzzle box that recurs time and again in her frightening dreams. Tucked away in the box is a letter from the great Ludwig Van that might answer the mystery of the whereabouts of a sort of Magic Flute. It’s not the pleasant Mozartean whistle, though. It’s the modified bone of yet another figure from Meer’s past, an Indian lover of four millennia ago, and this bit of custom carving can send almost anyone who hears it into paroxysms of memory-induced horror. She heads to Vienna to find that musical bone, but almost immediately upon our stressed-out heroine’s arrival in the old Hapsburg capital, bodies begin to drop and Meer realizes that she’s being hunted. Helping her to dodge the heavies is the Philharmonic’s handsome first-chair oboist. As the metronome ticks away the seconds, a bereft reporter, his Israeli family having been blown up by terrorists, sets a time bomb in the largely forgotten Roman ruins under the Philharmonic, thereby dispatching the security mavens who have rented the fabled concert hall.
Confused? Few readers will care enough to unravel this ridiculous plot.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7783-2584-0
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sly, unsettling, and impossible to put down.
Land asks if we are doomed to repeat the sins of our fathers—or, in this case, mothers—in her assured, creepy debut.
Fifteen-year-old Annie has a new home in London—and a new name, Milly—now that she's turned her mother in to the police. Psychologist Mike Newmont, his troubled wife, Saskia, and their daughter, Phoebe, have taken Milly in until her mother’s trial begins in 12 weeks. Only Mike and a few others know who Milly really is: the daughter of a nurse who murdered nine young children. Mike will be overseeing Milly’s therapy until the trial and is eager for her to fit into his family. However, Milly, who narrates the book, senses that something isn’t right between Saskia and Phoebe, and Phoebe, along with her friends, immediately starts a campaign of terror against the newcomer, whom she sees as an intruder in her family. Milly does find a friend in a younger girl, Morgan, who obviously has family problems of her own, but as the trial looms, Milly struggles to be the good person she longs to be even as the voice of her mother pushes her to give in to her darker urges. Can Milly find her own way, or is she a slave to her upbringing? Land, a mental health nurse, puts her knowledge to good use in her portrayal of Milly, who was raised by a sexually abusive monster who recruited her to play a role in her unspeakable crimes. A sense of creeping dread drives the narrative, and that most fascinating of crime-novel subjects, the female serial killer, casts a formidable shadow. Milly wages a war within herself that she may or may not win. Readers will be more than happy to go along for the ride and may be surprised how they feel about the conclusion, proving the unmistakable spell that Land has cast.
Sly, unsettling, and impossible to put down.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08764-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
A long buildup culminates in a climax that’s not as satisfying as the rest of the story.
History seems to repeat itself across generations when a murder and the disappearance of a painting lead a Connecticut woman to investigate her sister’s private life.
Marred by tragedy at an early age, sisters Kate Woodward and Beth Lathrop coped with their mother’s murder and their kidnapping during an art heist in the family gallery in two very different ways. Beth married Pete Lathrop, started a family, and continued the family tradition of mentoring starving artists as part of the now-named Lathrop Gallery in the town of Black Hall. Kate was unmoored by what happened, becoming a pilot traveling through life with no connection to anyone except for Beth and childhood friends Lulu and Scotty. When Beth is six months pregnant, she’s killed in her own home, and Moonlight, the Benjamin Morrison painting stolen in the first heist, once again goes missing. Detective Conor Reid couldn’t be more shocked by the turn of events. He’s kept an eye on Beth and Kate for years since being part of the team that investigated the first crime, oversight that Rice presents as sweet rather than stalkerish. Conor is certain that Pete killed Beth. After all, the marriage was on the rocks, and Pete already had a new child with Nicola, his paramour. But Conor’s theory of the crime is harder to prove than he anticipates. Kate’s just as desperate to learn the truth about Beth, and she finds that the more she investigates Beth’s last day, the more she wonders whether she ever knew her sister at all.
A long buildup culminates in a climax that’s not as satisfying as the rest of the story.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1820-3
Page Count: 412
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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