Despite a somewhat sluggish plot, this thriller provides many pleasures.
A murder investigation in a supersecret Soviet city reveals a number of surprises.
Fyodor Petrov dies miserably and alone in a "city that does not exist," where Soviet scientists and engineers secretly develop nuclear arms. Arzamas-16 is a fairyland within the grim reality of Soviet Russia: Consumer goods are freely available, subversive literature is openly read, and even the local KGB defers to the agenda of the cadre of scientists who work there. But Petrov's death sets off alarms, and Alexander Vasin, an investigator in "Special Cases," a quasi-independent branch of the KGB, is sent to nose around. Petrov was working on RDS-220, a superbomb, larger than any bomb previously developed anywhere, a project headed by professor Adamov, the de facto ruler of Arzamas-16. Petrov's death has been ruled a suicide by Gen. Zaitsev, who heads the local security forces; he resents Vasin's investigation and over time hampers it somewhat, but Vasin nevertheless manages to uncover good reason to doubt the suicide scenario and pursues his investigation, to the discomfort of a number of individuals. Matthews is especially adept at limning the bureaucratic infighting and political double-dealing that permeate Soviet society, but Vasin is able to cut through much of this, thanks in part to the power wielded by his boss, Gen. Orlov, and in the course of his inquiry learns quite a bit about nuclear weapons and the projection of power and deterrence. In Arzamas-16, politics and physics are inextricably entwined, as the investigation slowly reveals, and though the murder mystery solution is a long time coming, the depiction of the forces and behaviors animating Soviet life are compelling. Vasin, Adamov, Adamov's wife, Maria, and the scientists and functionaries of Arzamas-16 are well-constructed characters, and the persistence of history is a powerful tidal presence.
Despite a somewhat sluggish plot, this thriller provides many pleasures.Pub Date: July 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54340-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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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