Despite the reflective tone of the tale, the plot is driven by so many boats moving at such top speeds that you have to hope...
Looks like Dr. Marion Ford’s latest research project in marine biology will have to wait for yet another tangle, his 25th, with members of a lower species.
Doc Ford (Mangrove Lightning, 2017, etc.) tells everyone who’ll listen that he’s come to the Bahamas to continue his study of sharks’ responses to the sound of boat engines. Even though he has official documents to support his story, it’s not the whole story; he’s really looking for archaeologist Leonard Nickelby, a former professor who ended his partnership with aging treasure hunter Carl Fitzpatrick by running off with three antique coins and a logbook recording all the best places Fitzpatrick had to search for booty. It turns out that Nickelby and his former student Lydia Johnson, who’s injecting him with the testosterone she’s scored from her stint in a veterinary practice, are after bigger, more recent booty: the $400 million Lydia’s former boss, con man Jimmy Jones, had skimmed from Benthic Exploration and managed to hide somewhere before Nickelby’s testimony helped send him to prison, where he was killed a few weeks ago. As Ford’s search for the searchers leads him first to dive-shack owner Tamarinda Constance then to Hubert "Sandman" Purcell, the trawler captain she spurned, his old pal Seagard Tomlinson learns that Ford’s not the only one looking for the people who are looking for the treasure. From this point on, felonies pop up faster than barnacles on a boat’s hull. So many characters are hiding so many secrets that so many other characters learn something about that it’s no surprise to find ad hoc alliances sprouting and dissolving hours later. The extravagant criminal tally includes impersonation, abduction, assault and battery, the reckless operation of seagoing vessels, and enough homicide to seriously thin the cast of treasure hunters and the people hunting them.
Despite the reflective tone of the tale, the plot is driven by so many boats moving at such top speeds that you have to hope there are no sharks in the neighborhood. If there are, poor them.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1278-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
One small step, no giant leaps.
Weir (The Martian, 2014) returns with another off-world tale, this time set on a lunar colony several decades in the future.
Jasmine “Jazz” Bashara is a 20-something deliveryperson, or “porter,” whose welder father brought her up on Artemis, a small multidomed city on Earth’s moon. She has dreams of becoming a member of the Extravehicular Activity Guild so she’ll be able to get better work, such as leading tours on the moon’s surface, and pay off a substantial personal debt. For now, though, she has a thriving side business procuring low-end black-market items to people in the colony. One of her best customers is Trond Landvik, a wealthy businessman who, one day, offers her a lucrative deal to sabotage some of Sanchez Aluminum’s automated lunar-mining equipment. Jazz agrees and comes up with a complicated scheme that involves an extended outing on the lunar surface. Things don’t go as planned, though, and afterward, she finds Landvik murdered. Soon, Jazz is in the middle of a conspiracy involving a Brazilian crime syndicate and revolutionary technology. Only by teaming up with friends and family, including electronics scientist Martin Svoboda, EVA expert Dale Shapiro, and her father, will she be able to finish the job she started. Readers expecting The Martian’s smart math-and-science problem-solving will only find a smattering here, as when Jazz figures out how to ignite an acetylene torch during a moonwalk. Strip away the sci-fi trappings, though, and this is a by-the-numbers caper novel with predictable beats and little suspense. The worldbuilding is mostly bland and unimaginative (Artemis apartments are cramped; everyone uses smartphonelike “Gizmos”), although intriguing elements—such as the fact that space travel is controlled by Kenya instead of the United States or Russia—do show up occasionally. In the acknowledgements, Weir thanks six women, including his publisher and U.K. editor, “for helping me tackle the challenge of writing a female narrator”—as if women were an alien species. Even so, Jazz is given such forced lines as “I giggled like a little girl. Hey, I’m a girl, so I’m allowed.”
One small step, no giant leaps.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-44812-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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