A promising novel that skillfully uncovers obstacles for its protagonist to overcome.
In this debut thriller, a repressed incident mars a young woman’s life for years.
In 2009, Ellie Frites is a 20-something in a dead-end customer-service job at a tech company who spends her downtime drinking with a handful of friends. She can’t seem to sustain a relationship with a man, although she does have a new boyfriend named Tim. She’s also still grieving her beloved father’s death, due to cancer, which happened more than a decade ago. Ellie’s humdrum existence is shaken up when she begins having upsetting visions of her middle-school days, set in a rundown part of Marshside, Massachusetts, known as The Hollow. The visions specifically involve Lauren Vine and Maxine Lang, two of her former school friends, with whom Ellie lost touch when her best friend, Sarah, arrived from private school. Now, she can’t remember anything about what happened to them: “Did they move? Switch schools?” When Ellie fails to get any more information from either Sarah or her own estranged mother, she decides to go see psychologist Elizabeth Rollins. The doctor’s hypnotherapy helps Ellie to unlock repressed memories, which may put her and those she loves, including Tim, in danger. In this well-paced narrative, Barrell explores the relationship between Ellie’s newfound recollections and her present-day existence. For example, the character considers herself to be a pathetic loser when, in actuality, it’s clear that her past trauma has inhibited her. Once Barrell reveals the monstrous crime at the center of Ellie’s story, readers will understand why Ellie’s mind blocked it out—and in this novel, what you can’t see can hurt you. The author also shows the subtle, positive changes in the main character’s life as she slowly discovers what’s been haunting her. The supporting cast members, both at Ellie’s work and in her private life, are equally believable. All told, Barrell’s admirable debut is an engaging journey into a troubled mind.
A promising novel that skillfully uncovers obstacles for its protagonist to overcome.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5432-4858-6
Page Count: 274
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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