A somewhat unwieldy novel that nonetheless delivers fast-paced, dramatic action and engaging, lively characters.
Sparks fly when a rock star teams up with a brilliant attorney in this sprawling tale of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll—and revenge.
It’s 1987, and British musician Colin Elliot has just re-emerged on the music scene, two years after a devastating car accident that killed Aurora, his heroin-addict wife, and left him close to death. Now, Colin’s determined to reignite his dormant career, but on his own terms. To that end, he enlists Laurel Chandler, a successful and beautiful attorney, as his official biographer, with the intent of publicly clearing the air regarding both the accident and his notorious late wife. Colin and Laurel’s relationship starts out icy, but before long they bond over similarities in their troubled pasts. The struggle to come to terms with a past that won’t stay buried is a recurrent theme in the book. It’s most clearly embodied by Hoop Jakeway, Aurora's unrequited high school suitor, who blames Colin for Aurora's untimely demise—he’s intent on avenging her death, no matter what it takes. The book opens with a gripping account of the fateful high-speed car chase across Michigan's remote Upper Peninsula, and then leaps forward two years to the sleazy drug dealers, scheming lawyers, put-upon managers and vulturelike paparazzi who inhabit Colin’s world. Mayle capably evokes the milieu of the ’80s-era rock star, though the book suffers from an overabundance of minor characters and some heavy-handed exposition. However, music fans will appreciate the references to classic pop songs sprinkled throughout the novel, while Hoop, with his misguided quest for vengeance, proves himself to be a complicated, fully realized character. But the novel falters in portraying the romance between Colin and Laurel, which never quite comes to life. Finally, a less-than-satisfying conclusion resolves one of the book’s main conflicts but leaves the other to be sorted in the next volume of the series.
A somewhat unwieldy novel that nonetheless delivers fast-paced, dramatic action and engaging, lively characters.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463557331
Page Count: 504
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
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