Fans of body bags would find this bloodbath perfection if only Oldham didn’t keep crosscutting among characters faster than...
Soldier of fortune Steve Flynn continues his one-man, no-holds-barred campaign against the forces of evil that just won’t leave him in peace.
The bad news is that Flynn’s lover, Spanish cop Maria Santiago, who along with Flynn and half a dozen others was marked for death (Ambush, 2016), has been beheaded and her last moments captured on video. The good news is that hit man Brian Tasker, who’d planned to play the video for Flynn as a prelude to killing him, is dead himself at Flynn’s capable hands. Where does that leave things? Tasker’s client, aging Albanian crime lord Viktor Bashkim, is still at large, still plotting Flynn’s demise and a host of lesser felonies, beginning with the summary execution of his untrustworthy partner, French gangster Michel Barkin. Superintendent Rik Dean, whom Flynn had to knock out to kill Tasker while he was in police custody, is determined to see Flynn tried for homicide. Molly Cartwright, the beautiful police officer who rings down the curtain on Flynn’s act of revenge by tasering and cuffing him, keeps trying to kiss off DS Alan Hardiker, the lover who cheated on her with another cop, and he keeps raising the stakes, eventually setting both Molly and Flynn up for a deadly ambush by Bashkim’s associates. And Bashkim, who’s lost most of his blood relatives and one of his favorite assassins to the unending wars required to maintain his position on top of the heap, hires married sociopaths Matthew Ainsworth and Lizzie Barnes, who, as “Mr. and Mrs. Jackson,” have developed a nice line in serial homicide themselves.
Fans of body bags would find this bloodbath perfection if only Oldham didn’t keep crosscutting among characters faster than a music video en route to this tranquilly satisfying reflection: “Usually revenge was a dull sensation, but this wasn’t. It was good.”Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7278-8729-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Severn House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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