Despite all the high tech and ballyhoo, the mother-and-daughter team writing as Tracy give their once formidable foursome...
The misfit computer geeks of Monkeewrench Software are called in to reopen a missing person case that rapidly blossoms, as if in response to their involvement, into a case of serial homicide.
Veterinary tech Marla Gustafson was so kindhearted that she wept over a rabbit she’d run over. So when her car, abandoned near a large bloodstain on a road in her rural hometown of Buttonwillow, shows no signs of mechanical failure, her father, Walt, feels certain she stopped to offer someone help and never returned. In the two months since she vanished, Detective Leo Magozzi and his colleagues on Minneapolis Homicide keep expecting to find some clue that links her death to that of Megan Lynn, a jogger found last May in Powderhorn Park with an ace of spades tucked into her clothing. But that clue has never materialized because Marla’s body has stubbornly refused to appear. So Walt and Magozzi join in asking Harley Davidson and the rest of the Monkeewrench crew to lend a hand. As Annie Belinsky and Roadrunner duly note, the quartet wouldn’t usually think of taking on a case like this, but their fourth member, Grace MacBride, happens to be carrying Magozzi’s child, and it’s hard to say no to him. Nodding gamely to each other, the gang fires up their state-of-the-art mobile computer lab and gets to work. Their quarry, meantime, seems bent on breaking the speed record for serial murder. When the body of General Mills executive Charlotte Wells is discovered in another local park along with a four of spades, investigators have to wonder what happened to spades two and three—especially after two more corpses turn up marked with the five and six of spades.
Despite all the high tech and ballyhoo, the mother-and-daughter team writing as Tracy give their once formidable foursome (The Sixth Idea, 2016) practically nothing to do in the way of either detective work or antic byplay and provide virtually no surprises along the way. Sad.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1245-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
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
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