A troubled woman tumbles down a dark path of deception and violence when three mythological creatures disrupt her life and marriage.
Constance is a woman with many problems, the most immediate of which is having to put on social graces and schmooze with the wives of her husband’s coworkers. The stress from one strained brunch meeting and the underlying tension with her husband, Sam, inspires Constance to do some impulse retail-therapy; drawn to a Grecian vase in a window display, she makes an ill-advised, expensive purchase. The antiques shopkeeper warns her against it, but Constance’s desire for the vase overrides any words of caution. Obsessed, she fights with her husband about reckless spending, but it’s when she opens the vase that her life truly spirals out of control and past problems resurface. Three wasplike creatures, Alecto, Megaera and Tisiphone, emerge from the vase and ultimately dredge up memories of Constance’s troubled relationship with her mother, Madeline. When Constance was young, she played with an imaginary friend named Rose; the Grecian troublemakers bring Rose back into Constance’s life. In the past, Rose’s “presence” disturbed and distressed Madeline, but in the present Constance and Madeline no longer speak, and Constance allows worldly, savvy, lustful Rose to possess her and Tisiphone to guide her, leading Constance into a treacherous world of violence, drugs and sex and revealing long-buried secrets about her parents’ marriage as well as her marriage to Sam, which was what prompted Madeline to disown her. The arc of the story hooks the reader with Bryant masterfully building suspense by gradually parsing out information, pulling the reader along on Constance’s downward trajectory. Though compelling, the darkness of the story may begin to wear on the reader as Constance’s life grows increasingly out-of-control. Some of Constance’s woes are understandable (chafing under an overbearing mother, longing for her deceased father), but many of her actions are reprehensible and her treatment of complete strangers is baffling. Despite the darkness, this is a well-crafted story and a fascinating modern spin on ancient Greek folklore, blended with family drama. A relentlessly cheerless but deftly rendered tale of one woman’s struggle to reconcile family secrets and her problematic marriage, while an ancient curse intervenes.
Pub Date: July 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-1460998243
Page Count: 335
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how...
A convicted killer’s list of five people he wants dead runs the gamut from the wife he’s already had murdered to franchise heroine Ali Reynolds.
Back in the day, women came from all over to consult Santa Clarita fertility specialist Dr. Edward Gilchrist. Many of them left his care happily pregnant, never dreaming that the father of the babies they carried was none other than the physician himself, who donated his own sperm rather than that of the handsome, athletic, disease-free men pictured in his scrapbook. When Alexandra Munsey’s son, Evan, is laid low by the kidney disease he’s inherited from his biological father and she returns to Gilchrist in search of the donor’s medical records, the roof begins to fall in on him. By the time it’s done falling, he’s serving a life sentence in Folsom Prison for commissioning the death of his wife, Dawn, the former nurse and sometime egg donor who’d turned on him. With nothing left to lose, Gilchrist tattoos himself with the initials of five people he blames for his fall: Dawn; Leo Manuel Aurelio, the hit man he’d hired to dispose of her; Kaitlyn Todd, the nurse/receptionist who took Dawn’s place; Alex Munsey, whose search for records upset his apple cart; and Ali Reynolds, the TV reporter who’d helped put Alex in touch with the dozen other women who formed the Progeny Project because their children looked just like hers. No matter that Ali’s been out of both California and the news business for years; Gilchrist and his enablers know that revenge can’t possibly be served too cold. Wonder how far down that list they’ll get before Ali, aided once more by Frigg, the methodical but loose-cannon AI first introduced in Duel to the Death (2018), turns on them?
Proficient but eminently predictable. Amid all the time shifts and embedded backstories, the most surprising feature is how little the boundary-challenged AI, who gets into the case more or less inadvertently, differs from your standard human sidekick with issues.Pub Date: April 2, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5101-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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