Too bad the young Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant aren’t around to star in the film version. How about Julianne Moore and...
A telephone call from a dead woman, the phenomenon of “lucid dreaming,” and a skillfully maintained atmosphere of increasing menace are the main ingredients of South African writer Mostert’s unusual debut thriller.
After receiving the aforementioned phone call, Isabelle “Isa” De Witt, initially unaware of its significance, travels to London to find herself the heir of her late cousin Alette Temple, killed in an automobile accident. A request from beyond the grave obliges Isa, ever deferential to Alette (who had once literally saved her life), to carry out an elaborate revenge plot directed at the pharmaceutical company of which Justin, Alette’s charismatic and sinister former husband (he’s “rich and looks like Heathcliff”) is the vulnerable CEO. Mostert ratchets up suspense efficiently, exploring Isa’s wavering fidelity to her task (as her own grief over the recent death of her married lover erodes her resistance to Justin’s charms), while simultaneously focusing on other involved characters—notably, the unidentified stalker who’s closer to Isa than she imagines. The plotline is an original one, and Mostert seasons it with absorbing psychological detail (for example, the possibility that people who are unusually close may experience “shared dreams”), in swiftly paced chapters appropriately prefaced by resonant quotations drawn mostly from the 17th-century English metaphysical poets (Keats creeps in at the end). Isa does—in the infuriating manner of those brainless heroines of Gothic romance who will persist in opening the wrong doors—keep putting herself in harm’s way. And the identity of the villain is ineptly concealed; in fact, halfway through, there’s virtually no doubting it. Nevertheless, the novel holds our interest throughout, and its climactic surprise—which occurs after Isa has returned, with Alette’s ashes, to South Africa—is a humdinger.
Too bad the young Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant aren’t around to star in the film version. How about Julianne Moore and Daniel Day Lewis ?Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-17385-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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
Irritatingly trite woman-in-periler from lawyer-turned-novelist Baldacci. Moving away from the White House and the white-shoe Washington law firms of his previous bestsellers (Absolute Power, 1996; Total Control, 1997), Baldacci comes up with LuAnn Tyler, a spunky, impossibly beautiful, white-trash truck stop waitress with a no-good husband and a terminally cute infant daughter in tow. Some months after the birth of Lisa, LuAnn gets a phone call summoning her to a make-shift office in an unrented storefront of the local shopping mall. There, she gets a Faustian offer from a Mr. Jackson, a monomaniacal, cross-dressing manipulator who apparently knows the winning numbers in the national lottery before the numbers are drawn. It seems that LuAnn fits the media profile of what a lottery winner should be—poor, undereducated but proud—and if she's willing to buy the right ticket at the right time and transfer most of her winnings to Jackson, she'll be able to retire in luxury. Jackson fails to inform her, however, that if she refuses his offer, he'll have her killed. Before that can happen, as luck would have it, LuAnn barely escapes death when one of husband Duane's drug deals goes bad. She hops on a first-class Amtrak sleeper to Manhattan with a hired executioner in pursuit. But executioner Charlie, one of Jackson's paid handlers, can't help but hear wedding bells when he sees LuAnn cooing with her daughter. Alas, a winning $100- million lottery drawing complicates things. Jackson spirits LuAnn and Lisa away to Sweden, with Charlie in pursuit. Never fear. Not only will LuAnn escape a series of increasingly violent predicaments, but she'll also outwit Jackson, pay an enormous tax bill to the IRS, and have enough left over to honeymoon in Switzerland. Too preposterous to work as feminine wish-fulfillment, too formulaic to be suspenseful. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)
Pub Date: Dec. 2, 1997
ISBN: 0-446-52259-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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