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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An addictive psychological thriller.
When a mysterious novel appears on her bedside table, a successful documentary filmmaker finds herself face to face with a secret that threatens to unravel life as she knows it.
Catherine Ravenscroft has built a dream life, or close to it: the devoted husband, the house in London, the award-winning career as a documentary filmmaker. And though she’s never quite bonded with her 25-year-old son the way she’d hoped, he’s doing fine—there are worse things than being an electronics salesman. But when she stumbles across a sinister novel called The Perfect Stranger—no one’s quite sure how it came into the house—Catherine sees herself in its pages, living out scenes from her past she’d hoped to forget. It’s a threat—but from whom? And why now, 20 years after the fact? Meanwhile, Stephen Brigstocke, a retired teacher, widowed and in pain, is desperate to exact revenge on Catherine and make her pay for what happened all those years ago. The story is told in alternating chapters, Catherine's in the third-person and Stephen's in the first, as the two orbit each other, predator and prey, and the novel moves between the past and the present to paint a portrait of two troubled families with trauma bubbling under the surface. As their lives become increasingly entangled, Stephen’s obsession grows, Catherine’s world crumbles, and it becomes clear that—in true thriller form—everything may not be as it seems. But how much destruction must be wrought before the truth comes out? And when it does, will there be anything left to salvage? While the long buildup to the big reveal begins to drag, Knight’s elegant plot and compelling (if not unexpected) characters keep the heart of the novel beating even when the pacing falters. Atmospheric and twisting and ripe for TV adaptation, this debut novel never strays far from convention, but that doesn’t make it any less of a page-turner.
An addictive psychological thriller.Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-236225-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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