Although the idea that a happy marriage would dissolve in two weeks' time strikes a false note, Daly’s second outing proves...
Daly’s sophomore effort tackles the difficult subjects of adultery and betrayal.
Natty multitasks, and that’s a problem. She’s the successful owner of an ultrahigh-end hotel in England, sharing duties with her handsome husband, Sean. The couple has two daughters and lives that are so busy they’re hardly in the same room at the same time—and they rarely have time for sex. When their youngest daughter, Felicity, suffers a ruptured appendix while on a school trip to France, Natty rushes to her side, leaving a visitor, her recently arrived college buddy, Eve, a psychologist on the lecture circuit, to take care of Sean and their other daughter, Alice. And take care of them she does. Eve launches into an immediate campaign to seduce Sean, and by the time Natty returns with Felicity, Sean is no longer hers. Hurt and angry, Natty embarks on a campaign to get her family back and soon finds that everything she thought she knew was an illusion. In the meantime, a confrontation between Natty and Eve brings back police detective Joanne Aspinall, who first surfaced in Daly’s debut novel (Just What Kind of Mother Are You?, 2013). Telling the tale in alternating voices—first person for Natty and third person for Joanne—Daly takes multiple moving parts and weaves them into a cohesive whole. There’s little mystery since the reader knows from the outset that Eve is cold and conniving, not caring whom she hurts; yet the author still manages to hold the reader’s attention. Daly has grown considerably since her somewhat clumsy debut, but this time, she turns in a not-quite-perfect piece of fiction that still wins with its immensely likable heroine and her dastardly feminine foil.
Although the idea that a happy marriage would dissolve in two weeks' time strikes a false note, Daly’s second outing proves absorbing.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 9780802123206
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.
Horrormeister King (End of Watch, 2016, etc.) serves up a juicy tale that plays at the forefront of our current phobias, setting a police procedural among the creepiest depths of the supernatural.
If you’re a little squeamish about worms, you’re really not going to like them after accompanying King through his latest bit of mayhem. Early on, Ralph Anderson, a detective in the leafy Midwestern burg of Flint City, is forced to take on the unpleasant task of busting Terry Maitland, a popular teacher and Little League coach and solid citizen, after evidence links him to the most unpleasant violation and then murder of a young boy: “His throat was just gone,” says the man who found the body. “Nothing there but a red hole. His bluejeans and underpants were pulled down to his ankles, and I saw something….” Maitland protests his innocence, even as DNA points the way toward an open-and-shut case, all the way up to the point where he leaves the stage—and it doesn’t help Anderson’s world-weariness when the evil doesn’t stop once Terry’s in the ground. Natch, there’s a malevolent presence abroad, one that, after taking a few hundred pages to ferret out, will remind readers of King’s early novel It. Snakes, guns, metempsychosis, gangbangers, possessed cops, side tours to jerkwater Texas towns, all figure in King’s concoction, a bloodily Dantean denunciation of pedophilia. King skillfully works in references to current events (Black Lives Matter) and long-standing memes (getting plowed into by a runaway car), and he’s at his best, as always, when he’s painting a portrait worthy of Brueghel of the ordinary gone awry: “June Gibson happened to be the woman who had made the lasagna Arlene Peterson dumped over her head before suffering her heart attack.” Indeed, but overturned lasagna pales in messiness compared to when the evil entity’s head caves in “as if it had been made of papier-mâché rather than bone.” And then there are those worms. Yuck.
Not his best, but a spooky pleasure for King’s boundless legion of fans.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8098-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
No wonder Scarpetta asks, “When did my workplace become such a soap opera?” Answer: at least 10 years ago.
Happy birthday, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. But no Florida vacation for you and your husband, FBI profiler Benton Wesley—not because President Barack Obama is visiting Cambridge, but because a deranged sniper has come to town.
Shortly after everyone’s favorite forensic pathologist (Dust, 2013, etc.) receives a sinister email from a correspondent dubbed Copperhead, she goes outside to find seven pennies—all polished, all turned heads-up, all dated 1981—on her garden wall. Clearly there’s trouble afoot, though she’s not sure what form it will take until five minutes later, when a call from her old friend and former employee Pete Marino, now a detective with the Cambridge Police, summons her to the scene of a shooting. Jamal Nari was a high school music teacher who became a minor celebrity when his name was mistakenly placed on a terrorist watch list; he claimed government persecution, and he ended up having a beer with the president. Now he’s in the news for quite a different reason. Bizarrely, the first tweets announcing his death seem to have preceded it by 45 minutes. And Leo Gantz, a student at Nari’s school, has confessed to his murder, even though he couldn’t possibly have done it. But these complications are only the prelude to a banquet of homicide past and present, as Scarpetta and Marino realize when they link Nari’s murder to a series of killings in New Jersey. For a while, the peripheral presence of the president makes you wonder if this will be the case that finally takes the primary focus off the investigator’s private life. But most of the characters are members of Scarpetta’s entourage, the main conflicts involve infighting among the regulars, and the killer turns out to be a familiar nemesis Scarpetta thought she’d left for dead several installments back. As if.
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-232534-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
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